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Comment by oneplane | Hacker News Reader

The thing with the FAANGs is that they can be rather unfulfilling. At first, when you are fresh out of the playground going in to commercial engineering, everything seems great, because you suddenly get paid to do a thing you like, and there is all this technology and information and people.

But that is not unique to FAANGs, and not unique to CS/IT. At some point you usually end up wanting more, either a more fulfilling job or a job that pays more. The former is probably going to have a human or societal component, the latter will drive you more to banks, economic institutions, insurance, government contractors, exchanges and similar jobs.

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>the latter will drive you more to banks, economic institutions, insurance, government contractors, exchanges and similar jobs.

I worked for a gov't subcontractor (for the USAF) and a bank prior to moving to the bay and working at a FAANG. The opportunities to make 500k+/year don't exist, outside a few private funds that grind you to dust. If you are super well connected and you can start a military contract firm, you can make tons of money, but that has nothing to do with things you'd learn in a CS + X double major. Think tanks and other economic agencies don't compare with a good FAANG salary. You'll start at 50k and be lucky to make 200k by the end. 200k is a starting salary for a facebook engineer in most markets. I have two friends who are engineers at insurance cos, they certainly don't work there for the money.

If you're talking about jobs that don't involve CS applications, I wouldn't have any idea, but this isn't what OP was asking about.

Not everyone picks a job based one what "fulfills" them. Some people are trying to pay down college debt, support a family, support a lifestyle etc. And if what fulfills you working with very smart and driven individuals on very difficult and ambiguous problems, I think you'll enjoy working for a large tech company.

FAANGs don’t pay that salary because it’s difficult work, they pay that salary because they have trouble keeping turnover down. It’s much like investment banks where the pay is great and many people really want to leave.

It’s up to you how you want to spend your life, but everyone I know is much happier after the left.

You mean once they worked at FAANG, saved up enough FU money and then left?

Yeah, I'm sure they are much happier.

No, many left within 2 years.

The average for Google is 3.2 years. For most, that is not FU money.

Just long enough to open the doors of any other job interview and bail to a company that doesn't shuffle them and their team around the office like game pieces in a never-ending re-org, a company that makes actual products instead of surveillance advertising systems (as the latter is impossible without the former), or a company that makes decisions not to work with oppressive governments based on more factors than if it will earn more than the potential PR damage will cost.

So, approx. 3 years == disillusioned?

Unless it was a planned stepping-stone all along, to land the real "dream" job and have the credentials to command a more magnanimous compensation than they would without that Google tenure.

For 'beginners' they usually don't have the experience or the network to plan such a stepping stone ahead of time.

If you come in the side door (shift sectors, side-learn upgrade your capabilities) you may have the experience to plan ahead like that. But this was about beginners so I suppose that doesn't matter in this case.

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