Ask HN: People who rejected a FAANG offer. Why?
Or put another way, what was more appealing about a non-FAANG offer that made you reject a FAANG offer?
My first 'career job' came from an interview invite generated from a referral from a friend. I was an on and off college student not sure what to do with myself. I figured I would do the interview as practice for when it counted later in life.
So I just was myself and winged it... got a job offer the next day.
They feed you all this nonsense about wanting to see creative solutions in the interviews, but if you study the material they give you, all the answers are there. It might as well be a certification.
"You did well initially but didn't study the material we gave you. Re-apply in 1.5 years." No thanks; I was just keeping my options open and don't have time for all that nonsense. If you have a decent offer, tell me; otherwise, stop wasting my time. And, of course, what happens 1.5 years later? They call and email you incessantly asking you to re-apply.
I always say it's like picking stocks. The chances that you've found a truly great opportunity on a project at Google that hasn't been found by 5 more qualified people aren't nothing, but they're pretty small.
When you're interviewing you are interviewing for a role but not with a team. So you don't know what you will be working on, and it seemed like when coming in, new hires always seem to get to be put on whatever. I talked to a couple of the managers who wanted to work with me, and it felt like these projects were kind of silly. Talking with people on the inside, it seems like the way to find something useful is to get in, then transfer to a team you want. But why would a qualified person want to go through all this craziness when they can just interview at a different company and meet the people they will work with, and talk about what they are working on? Like a normal job? It seems like Google's process is highly skewed toward "great for Google, shaft the candidate." Which they can do, because everyone wants to work for Google, so why not only hire kool-aid drinkers?
And just to bring up the empire building again, if every great opportunity has so many people wanting it, it tends to lead to toxic behavior and culture due to unhealthy competition.
Alternative would be twice the salary, retire early, I guess. And I think if I did that, I'd be spending my time the exact same way I am right now. Only after a few hellish years having my soul drained by making people click on more ads.
I'm also not sure why you're presume autonomy brings fulfillment. All job offers I had gave plenty of autonomy. I'd take genuine community over autonomy in most cases. People are social creatures.
I'm also not sure why you'd presume I work at a startup. I work at a large and ancient not-for-profit many times older than FAANG. I work on an internal startup-like project. What they historically did was super-labor-intensive, and you can do it better integrate digital technology and big data. People can do more, better. I'm trying to do that.
To be clear: (1) I don't have an NDA, and I can openly talk about what I do. I don't need to keep secrets. (2) My work will help people in significant and visible ways. (3) It's technically fascinating (and I can publish research papers on anything I do).
That's not an abstract Google/startup/tech transform the world: ("At BILLINGLY DOT COM, we are changing lives by TRANSFORMING HOW PEOPLE DO BILLING"), but having direct, positive impact, potentially on millions of lives. Right now, I'm doing pilots, so it's impacting a few individuals, but if those are successful, the organization can take this to scale.
There are surely such projects at FAANG too, occasionally, but they're rare, often highly political, often incompetently done, and it's not the offer I had.
I’m not saying learning data structures and algorithms are useless. Only that testing for them using timed tests with toy puzzles is silly and not for everyone.
At one of them I had a strong recommendation for a specific project which allowed me to skip the initial screening but I declined in an interview as I didn't want to move to the USA and they weren't remote friendly.
I am quite happy where I am in my career and industry ! Feel that I have a huge impact in the business at a global scale. Starting over as just-another-sw-engineer-in-a-large-company doesn't seem attractive.
My initial question was always "Can I stay here in Scotland?" to which the reply was "You will move to either Ireland, or Switzerland." At that point I said "Please stop calling/emailing me"
At some point they stopped calling/mailing, looking over my email archive it has been ten years+ since I've heard from anybody at Google.
There's no way I was going to commute to London every day. Nightmare. They kept coming back to me though.
In my case I think it was more likely a combination of poor process, and a clueless recruiter, rather than a deliberate retargeting of me that resulted in the ongoing calls/emails.
I also have ethical issues with spending my existence working for some of them (Facebook is the grimiest offender by far), and the line blurs quite a bit into questionable territory for some of these companies.
I'm a software engineer and technical manager with just shy of 20 years of experience. I've never received a job offer from a FAANG company, but I've said "no thanks" to Google recruiters a number of times over the last ~10 years, and several years ago I did an initial remote interview with Netflix before declining their offer of an onsite interview. Here are my own personal reasons against working for a FAANG company:
Facebook/Google: Surveillance capitalism at its finest; working for one of these would be using my talents to further the greatest privacy-violating data collection regime (with virtually zero government oversight) the world has ever seen. I'd rather give up programming entirely and work retail.
Amazon: less objectionable than FB/Goog, but only slightly. They treat their non-engineer employees like complete crap, and I've heard that the quality of life even on the engineering side is very much dependent on the org you end up in and your manager.
Apple: Their privacy game is much stronger than any of the above, and I use their devices daily. Their walled gardens and locked-down devices mean they are a far cry from the hacker-friendly Apple I remember as a kid in the 80s. Their culture also seems very secretive and rather cult-like which leaves a bad taste in my mouth (though maybe this is improving since Steve's death?)
Netflix: by far the least objectionable FAANG, many fewer privacy concerns and the product is good IMHO. However, they have a hard policy against remote work, at least for the team(s) I was looking at, and I don't want to live anywhere near SF Bay. This is the only reason I ended the interview process with them.
Aside from all of the above and even if you disagree with everything I said, FAANGs are just so huge that the incremental value you add by joining is likely to be tiny. I've spent the last ~10 years working at startups to mid-size companies (from 5 up to 200 people) and I feel that my work is much more impactful than it could ever be at a FAANG.
I'd add one other issue to Apple (which would otherwise be the most natural fit for me). Side Projects.
I love building and launching apps and side projects and at Apple, as I understand it, that's a no-no. That's why so many devs left to set up new projects.
Instead a lot of these comments are from people who seem to have an axe to grind against the companies themselves. It's fine to have ethical or practical disagreements with FAANG companies, but it's not relevant to the OP's question about why someone would go as far as receiving an offer and then decline to accept it.
This is not a judgement of your take. I’m merely offering my perspective.
I’ve worked at a large oil and gas exploration company for a couple years, fintech for several more years, and before all that I had two back to back internships at a nationwide insurance company. Since then, I’ve hopped around a few of the FAANGS you listed.
The other companies paid me less, but they were not less stressful, nor did they have a better work environment or company culture. As a matter of fact, the culture is fairly reminiscent of Office Space (and I don’t mean in a funny way). One of these companies did some fairly negligent things around the last recession. The oil and gas company treats people like less than humans and taught me what ageism means. They would hold the lunch and learns where they told us to tell family and friends that earthquakes are in no way related to fracking. They literally walked out everyone over 50 during the industry downturn when I was there. The insurance company had massive layoffs while I was interning before my senior year in college and replaced them with offshore “IT”.
My post is not a defense of FAANGs. I’m just saying all my other experiences were worse and paid significantly less.
Where do we go from here? I’m not exactly an entrepreneurial type.
Before that, I was in several small companies in ad-tech. I didn't feel great about the work, but the cultures were also laid back and family-friendly. Non-FAANG companies with great culture are out there; please don't settle :)
Edit: if you're looking for the highest-paying jobs, you are correct in that often times, looking at a basket of job offers, FAANGs will offer the highest comp levels. If getting the highest possible compensation is your only criteria I think you are going to have a much tougher time finding compelling non-FAANG offers (though conversations with former colleagues lead me to believe that high-comp non-FAANG offers are indeed out there). I've chosen to prioritize my own happiness and time with my family over high compensation, and I can get by on the lesser (but still high in relative terms) comp offered by smaller firms.
Learned a lot at DataDomain as it scaled from a reasonably small team to a large enterprise and eventually got acquired. Financially though, would have fared much better in Google (assuming I had stuck around).
Also, the interviewer explained that I had 3 weeks for studying a list of computer science concepts for the interview.
I already have a Master's degree and I am working, I don't need to study to proof my profesionality.
I’m just a new grad soon to be graduating whereas my peers are always talking about landing positions at FAANG while missing out on other opportunities. I think its important to look at things from different perspective.
Reason being is I used to work for a small company and had to do everything myself, then I moved to a bigger company and I did a fraction of stuff compared to my previous company, but for a lot more money. It was a bit of a shock and it got me thinking. So I figured the larger the company, the more corporate the environment is; you are more restricted as to what and how you are allowed to do. I don't like that, so I moved back to a smaller company for less money and never even considered working at a BigCorp again.
You can make a case for both, depending on what you prefer. If you like prestige/cult/money and want that stamp on your CV then work your way up to FAANG. If you're curious, easily bored and like implementing solutions your way then work at a small company. Cool tech does exist outside FAANG. I can look back at each company I worked for and proudly talk about solutions I developed and implemented, most of which are still in use today and can be seen or used by customers/users. I'm not sure if I could have such an impact on a business working at BigCorp.
Sure you don't get paid as much and you can't brag to your friends and family you work for FAANG, but it feels really good when you suggest a solution to your manager/boss, then research it, build it and implement in and they TRUST you fully to do all that. You're part of the entire process and there's a certain satisfaction with having such freedom.
I interned at one and turned down a grad-job offer. I never was proud of myself for working at a big-tech company that is infamously awful to its more replaceable staff. The pay cut (at least at this point in my life) is worth not feeling like I'm actively contributing to a global evil.
No regrets about my decision.
Edit: it was Twitter though, so not FAANG, although I'd also interned at Amazon previously.
If you enjoy working full-time at a FAANG, or if you've never tried it, you shouldn't pass up the opportunity.
I already knew I didn't enjoy it, and I didn't want to waste any more of my youth which I felt I had already wasted studying hard at a nerdy male-dominated college with non-stop internships. So that's why I did what I did.
- I had already worked at Microsoft for 2 years in 2009-2011, there isn't much value addition to your resume after you have worked at one such big tech company.
- I was hired by the Android TV team, which is not a product I use and not my area of interest. It was mildly disappointing that they only gave one option in the team matching process.
- I am not a very suburban person, and commuting from SF to MV every day seems appealing at the outset but gets very cumbersome after a few weeks. Google doesn't tell you whether the team will be located in SF / MV when you interview, you are allowed to choose when you go through team matching.
In summary, I had made enough money already and my resume had Microsoft brand (though it was not a FANG in 2009). Touchwood, I have been able to get through all the recruiter filters whenever I have applied and I think that's the only advantage of working at FANG.