Ask HN: What interests you to work at a FAANG
I think there are several reasons to get a job at FAANG such as good compensation and interesting problems. But if we look at other companies interesting problems exists every where
Paycheck. Near infinite runway. Career path. Resources to potentially work on crazy projects that are really risky but might have big paybacks. A large pool of developers from which you will almost certainly find a couple with similar interests to yourself.
Downside:
Massive company. Massive beaurocracy. Massive politics. A lot of people only work there in the hopes of funneling money into their pockets. A lot of people only work their in order to feel good about their resume. Good chance that you will be stuck in a group somewhere getting ground under the foot of someone on a power trip. People, people everywhere and none of them are like me (well there are -- see upsides -- but they are needles in a haystack). Oddly, people see FAANG on your resume and think you are a lackluster money-digger -- especially if you stayed there a long time.
/me is old enough to have worked at one of the biggest, richest companies in the world that nobody now has ever heard of (because it disappeared under a pile of accounting fraud -- did I mention the people funneling money into their pockets?)
2. Compensation: The RSUs are real money, FANGs pay the best in the industry.
3. Job Security: FANGs have large cash reserves. There's lower likelihood of a FANG going under compared to an up and coming unicorn
4. Brand : Having a FANG on a resume helps you find jobs and possibly get investments. Notice how companies advertise as "We have engineers from Google, Facebook and Netflix" in their job posts
5. Perks like amazing health insurance, 401k match, free food etc
6. Mentorship: A FANG is likely to have more senior engineers, with experience. A startup is more likely to have younger folks. There's a lot to learn from people with experience in the industry.
I’ve been looking for good mentors for years but have been stuck at startups. I worry that mentorship will escape me if I get on the wrong team at FAANG. I feel like this is the #1 thing limiting in my career. (Good guidance) I can’t imagine having a mentor who isn’t on my team who would actually want to mentor me.
For more general mentorship, especially as your career develops, it’s the same as anywhere, you have to find someone you get along with and who can help you learn. The advantage at a big company is that there’s a huge pool of potential mentors, and you can see their calendars and coordinate more easily than if you were hunting in the community. :)
Job security: I don't think there's been a major layoff of engineers at any of these companies in years, if ever.
Peers: It's great knowing that wherever you go in the company and whatever you do, you can usually rely on your peers being competent and reasonable. Of course nowhere is perfect but these companies still act as a decent filter.
Culture: The companies are largely focused on data-driven decision making and something vaguely resembling a meritocracy, rather than the bureucratic middle-management driven hell one might find in more traditional companies like banks.
Flexibility: Most of the companies are fairly accommodating when it comes to switching teams, even when a relocation is involved. Taking Google as an example, you can start your career working on Android in Mountain View and finish it as a high-level SRE for an entirely different project in London. This is very different to say a startup where the company likely has one major product line and you can't really deviate from it.
Another one: the internal tooling is great. Writing code and deploying services is a lot smoother at FAANG than other companies I've been at (even large established ones).
Folks over at r/Wallstreetbets use the term FAGMAN. I'm not sure if that's politically correct!
It was Cramer back in 2013 who coined the term. It was a term for stocks, although on HN and around the engineer-verse I always took it to mean "big tech" companies that pay really well.
https://www.applicoinc.com/blog/faang-is-out-famga-is-in-why...
Downside: First party software. The really big tech companies like to develop their own software rather than fund their perceived competitors. When the company you work for is a market leader this is fine (ex. Microsoft w/ MS Office), but sometimes you wind up being stuck with software that sucks (Ex. Microsoft w/ Internet Explorer up until Edge came out, and arguably after). Also, you're often a permanent beta tester for these tools, which can be frustrating.
I work in security. There is no other place on earth where I can deploy code that improves the security posture of more people. The numbers are staggering.
2. Management training and mentorship
I manage a team. All the managers at my company go through some pretty excellent training and people take mentorship very seriously. The end result is that I have a great boss and I feel like I am capable of being a great boss. This makes a huge difference since I feel like everybody around me is on the same team. This has its limits, of course, but in general it produces an atmosphere where I feel happy to work rather than scared to fail.
3. Tooling
Because these companies are so big, they can afford to have world class teams that work exclusively on tooling. The end result is that the development workflow just works (modulo some exceptions).
Since then I've transferred 4 times. One of my posts was 4.5 years, the shortest was 9 months. When transferring (as opposed to hopping) you keep your pay, vacation and other benefits. If it's a bad fit, transferring again is probably pretty easy. And the interviews are much much easier than new-hire interviews. Potential teams can see your work, and they know you've passed the minimum bar, so unless you're changing job ladders there is no technical interview.
I spent close to 15 years solving interesting problems at startups. I learned a ton, but also had to deal with the stress of the companies' financial security as well as the downturns of 2008 and the early 2000's.
After my last startup was acquired, I spent a few years at large companies and learned that while I felt pretty "been there, done that" WRT to writing code, I really enjoyed mentoring people and working cross-functionally with other leads, architects, etc. across the company to define initiatives.
That let me to FAANG, where I'm still solving interesting problems, mentoring junior folks, working cross-functionally across the company, etc, but I'm literally making 3x what I made at my highest paid startup gig. Once the house and kid's college are paid for, I can see myself going back to early stage startups to get back to my roots, so to speak.
Personally I've only been coding professionally for a few years and while I've learned mostly self taught a HUGE amount of coding outside of some aspects you can only learn so much / a lot is missing. People like to cover the obvious and the controversial, but ...
Tests, debugging, coding structure, decision making, how they think through their code as they write it / troubleshoot, refactoring, and even things like "here's how you want to handle errors" are largely absent on the internet. But I don't want to see just ONE way to do it, I want to see lots of ways of handling such things.
And honestly, I'm older, and I get a lot of energy from being around younger and/or more energetic folks and I get the feeling that's pretty common at FAANG.
A second tier manager, for example of a few teams, might be parallel to high level manager "outside" and working in FANG is a good way to expedite your career if you are into that.
Upside: Resume builder Career path Normal to regular levels of payments, around 40k usd o less a year
Downsides: Satellite office, not that much growth in this location. Huge bureaucracy, huge politics, really really small cog in the machine
- improvement in CV and trustworthiness (think of how many people market themselves as exGoogle, exams, exAmazon) when doing something different
- perks
Quantitative firms like Jane Street, hedge funds like Citadel or Two Sigma pay well and hire a good amount of engineers. A FANG would have more work life balance and would be more chilled out than these places.
Once US/Canada borders are reopened I will be interviewing with them all.