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Comment by smattiso | Hacker News Reader

Don't listen to this guy. You don't have to change your own identity and your own personal compass to fit your company. You also don't have to succumb to the "starving Ethiopians" fallacy and take whatever crap job is given. This life has a billion paths you can take. Understand the tradeoffs and make a calculated decision but follow your own path. Granted you may end up homeless. But from experience there are way more people slogging it out at work doing the 9-5 putting in the bare minimum than people who find a passion and go for it. If your passion is basket weaving you are probably screwed but given that you are an engineer there are a million problems that need to be solved. Find one, might even be within your own company.

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Parent is not asking them to do that:

> So either start putting in your best work, or switch teams or company and see if it suits you better... or else accept that you're being a freeloader and pretending to do more work than you really are.

It's definitely a choice here, but the point is the OP needs to actually make some active choices and decide what they're ok with.

I agree with what you are saying. The "tough-love" message is usually to "suck it up" and stay where you are. "Life sucks, get over it." My point is if you are smart enough to be in a FAANG you are smart enough to do great work and make an impact on this world. You don't have to settle for fixing tiny bugs in some admin page for an ad company. I know there are people that are 100% cool with doing that for $$$. If you are not cool with it, then figure out a way to change it because there are enough problems to solve that if you are a smart engineer and you aren't doing shit and hating your day then you are wasting your talent.

>If you are not cool with it, then figure out a way to change it

>So either start putting in your best work, or switch teams or company and see if it suits you better.

You and the OP are essentially saying the same thing, except they are adding that an honest days wage deserves an honest days work

You are assuming that FAANG companies are offering "fair" compensation for the output of their engineers. How would anyone ever make a profit doing that?

Employees are very rarely the exploiters and almost always the exploited.

If it wasn’t fair, why did you accept the offer?

Let’s not pretend that FAANG employees are like an underclass that has to accept a job out of desperation.

It can simultaneously be true that 1) FAANG employees (including myself) are compensated and rewarded well above the national average, and potentially better than any other stable option available, and 2) FAANG employees are not adequately compensated for the value and revenue they generate for the company.

Amazon does not get the richest CEO in the world by truly compensating employees what they are worth to the company. Facebook literally tells employees that they target 90-95% of "market rate" for engineering salaries, based on location of the office they work in, and they refuse to negotiate with competing offers, resulting in massive compensation disparities between London and Seattle/Menlo Park.

I'm 35 and compensated far and above what I ever could have dreamed of making as a teenager, but when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work, I don't consider my compensation "fair". A pat on the back, an "exceeds" rating, and a 15% increase in my bonus for that half is peanuts by comparison.

Yes, but where it goes off the rails is when people expects the corporation to act against their own incentives. When people complain about compensation they get confused about how compensation is set.

Pay is not about the value you bring as much as it is about your leverage in negotiations. There’s many ways to get leverage like being the only person who can solve the problem, or systemic levers like unions.

If people aren’t getting paid adequately it’s usually because they don’t have the negotiation leverage to fix it. Conversely, we all probably know people who are of dubious value yet can command handsome salaries because they have some unique leverage.

Yes, unions and coordinated negotiation are the correct answer, but that's very difficult to pull off in companies this large with employees compensated so far above the cost of living.

100% agree that it's not easy, but it's almost certainly easier than the fight for collective bargaining during the industrial revolution. The idea that people just have too much to lose by fighting for it just underscores the point about negotiation leverage.

> but when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work, I don't consider my compensation "fair"

This is a failure in reasoning about how pay works.

Pay (salaried jobs, not commission) for a role is related to the difficulty in hiring (replacing) and retaining an employee for that role. A role's impact in terms of dollars changes over time. The safety in this is that if you don't happen to save $10mm this year, you still probably have a job. And your company can have roles like R&D (where many projects don't generate money at all), internal tools, etc.

> when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work

I would hazard a guess that this work wasn't 100% yours. Ops, oncall, infosec, accounting, etc etc all participate. This is Obama's "you didn't build that alone" argument.

The question isn't how much did you save, the question is could your employer hire someone else to drive the same outcome for less (or more).

> Let’s not pretend that FAANG employees are like an underclass

Depends on your baseline.

If you use other workers in the US, then you are correct.

If you use a counterfactual in which employees meaningfully participate in corporate governance, then you are incorrect.

>If you use a counterfactual in which employees meaningfully participate in corporate governance, then you are incorrect.

Can you elaborate on this point? Do you mean that FAANG employees do or do not have a seat at the table?

Even shareholders have a historically unusual inability to participate in corporate governance at Facebook. The closest comparison I have found is the oil trusts from the 19th century. But that's not a good comparison, because they were trusts, not corporations.

I seriously can't believe Delaware allows Facebook's voting structure. Corporate law has evolved in a really strange direction over the past few decades.

Interesting, I don't know much about FB governance. I would venture to say it's probably (and unfortunately) becoming the norm rather than the exception that employees have little input into governance. This is another area where I think unions have benefit.

My point about being a tech "underclass" was more about avoiding conflating FAANG employees with those who have little opportunity or options. FAANG employees generally have more portable skills than, say, an uneducated immigrant employee and I don't know that I agree they could both be "exploited" in the same way. While it may be rooted in valid points, it's a bit cringey to use the same language to describe both.

> You are assuming that FAANG companies are offering "fair" compensation for the output of their engineers. How would anyone ever make a profit doing that?

Are you saying companies should have no profits in order to be fair? Profitability doesn't really reflect ethical pay, just look at Amazon, they had no profits for years.

I think it's a fallacy to think that you are smarter if you land a job at a Big N company. I know a few, you I wouldn't qualify as smarter than average on any scale are working at those companies because they happen to get good referrals and got lucky on interview days.

Exactly this. People fall for the blackshine of FAANG and large corporations etc. but this is just a PR. In reality, the larger the company is (was working for a few bluechips as subcontractor, including two from FAANG), more miserable is life for a developer that has still some life. It is a golden cage, where the largest problem is huge number of different "best practices" as they try to streamline the job. Endless discussions, processes, politics,...

For someone young, corporations are waste of life. See the world, get expiriences and when you are over 40 and you are sick of adventures take your enourmous CV and join the corp to wait for a pension. You will like the peacefull pace and they will love not having problems with you.

Suggestion over the thumb, before employing in large company, check two things. Number of manager levels from team manager to CEO and how fast they got additional levels of management. This will tell you all about the company you are joining.

I think the point is that OP is short-changing his/her own career. If you're doing the equivalent of 1 day of work over 5 days, and it's OK to your manager, you are performing at what most FAANG companies would call "Meets Expectations" which is just treading water career-wise. If your goal is to just tread water for the rest of your life and take a paycheck, then by all means keep doing it. If your career goals include climbing the ladder, working on something "meaningful", joining a high performing team with cool technology, standing out and getting prestige, whatever they are, you're probably not going to get there by relaxing on the "Meets Expectations" cruise control setting.

One thing I wish I learned earlier in life is that your career is your responsibility, not your manager's, not your company's. I spent way to many of my early years asking "What tickets should I work on now, boss?" and too few asking myself "Where do I want to take my career long term, and what steps do I take now, next year, and next 5 years, to get there?"

> If you're doing the equivalent of 1 day of work over 5 days, and it's OK to your manager

As developers, we want our managers to trust us. We don't want managers to micro- us and question our time estimates. If I say doing some task will take X weeks, I don't want management to say "do it faster". The manager doesn't know the technical details and complications like the developer does.

Here, OP is explicitly abusing that trust, taking most of the week off but pretending to be working. He/she is meeting expectations by misrepresenting the complexity and difficulty of the work.

> You also don't have to succumb to the "starving Ethiopians" fallacy and take whatever crap job is given

Just opinion so feel free to downvote to oblivion.

It's hard for me personally to rationalize their position as a 'crap job' (as I have had really crappy jobs in my life - see US Army). Maybe op's take is a little brash, however, there's some perspective to be drawn from the comment. Agree with your sentiment though.. If you don't like it do something about it.

I think 'crap job' can be multifaceted. For instance take someone making a million a year at a hedge fund with a strategy of frontrunning public pension fund trades. To some that is a dream job, to others that is a waste of life. It depends on the individual. Some hate the Army, and some sign up to do 4 tours. You have to find your own purpose and your own way of staying motivated.

>To some that is a dream job, to others that is a waste of life.

This is what a lot of people forget - your experience isn't everyone's experience, and your perspective is just that - your perspective.

Just because OP has a job that you would consider a dream, his opinion isn't invalid.

For an example: I went to college to escape a farming life. Now all of my young, relatively wealthy friends tell me how lucky I was to grow up on a farm and live a simple life. They talk about how they want that simple life. And they're confused when I respond with something to the effect of: bitches, farming isn't simple. It's hard work for really, really, really low margins. There's a reason I went to college, and that was to get away from that mess.

US Army ranked about middle of the road as far as crap jobs went for me. ( MOS 19D )

Very MOS dependent and POGs tend to have a good time in the military

IT really is the top of the food chain, if you can handle stress, for employee type positions.

Try some farming, concrete work or other manual labor if you want to experience shit jobs

> You also don't have to succumb to the "starving Ethiopians" fallacy and take whatever crap job is given.

That’s very true, but there’s also the reality check that the job market has a lot of uncertainty right now. We tech people tend to have pretty good career mobility, but if the market contracts badly enough, it really may come down to taking whatever job you can get. Which as much as it sucks it’s what a lot of people have to do to put food on the table. The OP seems to be lacking motivation. Maybe the prospect of being jobless and without health insurance can be its own motivation ;).

I do agree with your point though, which I think is don’t just take what’s being given to you, do something about it. I think that’s also a version of what the parent comment was getting at (you don’t have to do little work just because management sets the bar low). And like someone else said on this thread, taking action may be extra important now. These low-output teams and employees are at a higher risk if the company decides to trim the fat.

Oh please, being a software dev in the US is being nothing but privileged. 'Starving Ethiopians' is not a fallacy - more than half of America makes less than $30,000. So yes, you are privileged and should be grateful.

Right, because doing something that ~everyone can do after some learning is such privilege

It absolutely is. There certainly isn't equal access to 'some learning'. Sure, resources may be online, but learning still takes time, energy, and a background of prior learning.

> Right, because doing something that ~everyone can do after some learning is such privilege

Because the GOOG or M$ is hiring former waiters right out of a sketchy code bootcamp? Good fuckin luck. You don't need to go to MIT to get in, but you certainty need some sort of legitimate qualifications.

OP is working at a FAANG+M type of place, which are universally well-known and offer base salaries that are are known to be some of the highest in the industry / country / world.

Literally thousands and thousands of other people are applying to those jobs online, and I'd bet several hundred of those could probably do the job adequately enough.

This line of reasoning is insane to me:

1. Exploitation and immiseration are real and severe at home and abroad.

2. This guy is luckier than most since he's not in one of the most hyper-exploited groups.

3. Therefore: he should check his privilege and work hard to make the FAANG corporation earn more money.

Connect the dots for me.

You and op might be more violently in agreement than you might have surmised.

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