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Comment by StillBored | Hacker News Reader

Role clarity is a huge one in my book. I've turned down numerous offers because when I asked what the specifics of my day to day job were going to be, the answers weren't clear.

From the secret FAANG that likes to pretend what they are doing is defense contractor level top secret, and even after your hired you might not know what your actually working on, to the big companies where its clear the hiring manager only has a vague idea what to do with someone because they are simply building an empire.

At least some of them are more upfront and say stupid things like "you get to define your role". Which is fine, if it comes with a grand vision, or your selling them on one, but frequently the grand vision is little more than "evolve our huge product, and justify it". Which is frequently just make work, and you won't be provided resources to actually implement a vision. And you can see this stuff in the public releases of products. Its the split personality of the windows control panel, where someone decided the current one wasn't good for a touch environment, but only had the manpower/political will to fix like the 5 most common things people want to change. So the results are garbage, and are the functional equivalent of 1/2 a wing glued to a car because someone wants an airplane but they only had a car.

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Of the big tech companies, I've worked at Facebook, Google, & Apple. I've still not quite cracked what's different about Apple culturally that they seem to be more immune to this problem. The only main difference I can spot is I don't recall ever encountering a PM at Apple. To do planning engineers would propose improvements, new features, etc. These were bubbled up. Then executives would be responsible for building a theme around those developments & how that fit larger company-wide themes for iOS. On the other hand, I don't know if that was an Apple-wide thing or iOS-specific (at the time it was hard to distinguish since the entire company was largely organized around iOS/MacOS).

Another difference is that design is top-down at Apple. Any UI redesign was driven by Johnny's team which was responsible for a holistic and consistent across-the-board implementation. I don't believe you were allowed to deviate from the design language. This one I have less visibility into as I worked on technology pieces rather than things that had a user-facing component.

Would echo your sentiment that the role of project manager, product owner or whatever they're calling it these days needs to be rethought. In my org we literally have a squadron of these individuals which leads to bickering and an in-cohesive product experience.

Micro-management has been institutionalized in much of corporate America while romanticizing "vision" without actually developing one.

So you have non-designers enforcing their personal "vision" without cross-team collaboration or user research.

My issue with the two “PM”s I interact with the most:

Project managers basically do something that the devs, especially dev manager, can handle themselves. It seems like a leftover process for when software contracting was more common. There’s no reason a developer can’t just manage the Kanban board and write a quick report.

Product managers can be really good but in a lot of cases they just devolve into stakeholder management with poor/no vision. Because they talk to upper management a lot they can get a lot of credit for things they didn’t have a lot to do with, because they’re the visible face for it. This can sometimes lead to the Product org getting too big because they get promoted up to Director and now need 10-100 reports for something that only needs like 3 Product managers max. Then you’re in a really bad spot because you’re going to be bothered by PMs with small scope a lot about stupid shit

project manager are there to free devs mind from various distractions.

I'm glad I can delegate them the reasoning about which task is more urgent, and them acting as buffer to clients frees me from a lot of time trying to understand what they want, how they want it and all the back and forth about how much they want to pay for it.

good project managers, that aren't just bossing internal people around but working with the team at different part of the projects like communication and operations, are rare, but are a joy to work with.

Project managers are very useful when there are clients and budgets to deal with, as in outsourcing and contracting shops.

The role is not as useful in tech companies where developers are working permanently. It's actually hurting collaboration across teams if you start budgeting projects and people tightly.

The definition of PMI on what is a project: A project can be defined as a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service.

The Devs who are permanent employees and maintain a set codebase/application/etc do not fall into that. They know what to do, they have a defined Change Management/SDLC abd they are challenged into finding the technical solutio. The project management includes tracking the requirements, sequencing events, getting resources/contractors, etc.. A dev should be spending '8h' per day coding, not figuring out budgets and interviewing contractors. Of course different companies have different approaches, but ballpark and from experience I think my above writings are pretty valid.

I think the issue is that we call it project/product manager, but what we actually want is secretary.

I used to see things the way you do.

Then I actually ended up in the position where I took on the responsibilities of a Project Manager in the course of building a department. I see it much differently now having worn both those hats as a generalist. You're tracking two different sides of the same body of work, and there is solid value that a good project manager provides in terms of producing a meaningful skeletal specification on which more in depth technical analysis and work can be done.

In addition, not all devs are full on gung ho let me throw something out there that I know will be mostly wrong until the details get filled in by everyone else. As a PM, you're as much the Rock in a pot of Rock Soup as you are the guy in meetings all the time. I've had to eat a lot of humble pie since getting saddled with building a department. The challenge is as much making sure things are in the right place at the right time, defining what the right time is, and making sure to unblock people as they run into obstacles.

It's a completely different type of work from straight up technical work, and is fundamentally destructive to maintaining the fine grained technical context you need to accurately implement something. You don't want to have to do it all at the same time.

Your experience meshes with mine perfectly.

Especially this is key: > The challenge is as much making sure things are in the right place at the right time, defining what the right time is, and making sure to unblock people as they run into obstacles

> It's a completely different type of work from straight up technical work, and is fundamentally destructive to maintaining the fine grained technical context you need to accurately implement something.

Exactly! Thank you for putting this so succinctly.

Just being aware of what needs to be done and in what order is critical. For that you need a bird's eye view of all relevant pieces, which is almost impossible to do when you are in the weeds.

Been thinking a lot about this - right now I run eng for a pretty broad product in healthcare, and there is overlap between eng and product.

In your case, it sounds like you have crappy product leadership. This is _way_ too common.

You need a cohesive product vision from the top down (VP/head of product), which they communicate to their team of PMs. The head of product needs to ensure that their team can make the correct product decisions. This means guidelines on where the product is going, what the company prioritizes, and how products inter-play/work together.

With an actual vision from the top down, these calls which your PM team bicker on should become easy.

An engineering analogy: the CTO/lead architect sets the standard for the direction of engineering, its services, etc. This is followed by everyone in the engineering org (hopefully) with alignment and without bickering. This SHOULD happen for product, too.

Really, I've noticed that at upper management this is literally your job: ensure that people make the right decision, whether they're your team, your peers, or upwards to the CEO.

You could probably reach out to your engineering leader and have them coach the head of product here. After all, that's the engineering leader's role - making sure their peers make the right decision and remove blocks from you, the engineer.

Regarding overlap, a good PM should amplify engineering. You might be a product focused engineer, but trust me: an engineering team cannot and should not be focused on writing user stories, performing research, and deciding the larger impact of features alongside their regular job of executing with code.

> Really, I've noticed that at upper management this is literally your job: ensure that people make the right decision, whether they're your team, your peers, or upwards to the CEO.

To expand on this, there has been one defining difference in good companies and bad companies I've worked for.

In good companies, everyone has expertise. Your PM can talk about details. Your director can talk about details. Your VP can talk about details. They do this because it's culturally expected that they know this. So they spend enough time to familiarize themselves and do normal paper-pushing responsibilities.

In bad companies, that's just... not there. If you ask anyone of those roles about details, they don't know and can't speak intelligently.

Consequently, in the former, you get much smarter decisions from all players. In the latter, you get ignorant decisions because there's less shared knowledge.

The strangest thing is that it seems more cultural than training / education. Either the company has this expectation of its people, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, no amount of degree will paper over that. If it does, it doesn't matter if your people are sharp but lack degrees.

There's a famous story from Microsoft back-in-Gates-days, whereby Gates was notorious for his detailed questions in meetings: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...

I took that as the "secret FAANG".

Apple definitely has PMs but they work differently than they do at most other companies.

Likely a direct legacy from the Steve Jobs days. When you have a CEO with such a strong product vision you don't actually need product owners/product managers any more other than to fill in the details. Those are still super important, but if you got those wrong it wouldn't pass review anyway.

The way Apple manages to do this is that, to a larger degree than others, the company is run as a collection of different companies. This has pros AND cons but one of the pros in this context is that their hiring is less "work at Apple", and more "work for THIS team at Apple". Hands-down unbeatable for the specific question of role clarity, but it's naive to pretend there aren't downsides to the practice.

This is how Bell Labs was back prior to divestiture, up until the mid 1990s.

There really wasn't one huge Bell Labs, there were literally hundreds of hundred person teams run as if they were little companies, but with a huge bureaucracy providing funding, guidance, and all sharing a knowledge pool.

If you changed teams, you could find a completely different team culture using completely different tools. And like biology, some teams thrived, and some failed.

similar to SRI currently as well.

This sounds an awful lot like research at a university. It definitely has it's strenths and weaknesses. Some labs collaborate more than others. Some feel like islands in the ocean, while others feel like a townhouse in the city. Some labs are poor and a few are incredibly wealthy. All of them seem to filled with hard working interesting people.

I’d say Apple is structured substantially less like a bunch of different companies compared to one which is explicitly split into separate SBUs.

Multi-divisional form (MDF / M-form).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-divisional_form

Usually contrasted with unitary form (U-form).

Yep, I have noticed this about project managers too.

I have worked with some amazing project managers, but almost all of them were more hybrid-somethings than purely business-degree folks. Usually designer-PMs or SWE/DS-PMs who drive the vision for the product at large. They make sure everyone in the loop buys into the same idea, is on the same page and stays in sync.

However, to do it effectively, the PM must have deep insights into the product. even better if the make-or-break aspect of the product is their specialty. A PM who facilitates communication without insights of their own is being treated like an expensive secretary by the company, and IMO, hurts the development of both the product and the individual.

I maintain that an amazing PM has scope to make a far larger impact than an amazing SWE. On the other hand, an average PM actively slows down progress, when an average SWE meets expectations and still gets their work done.

The key characteristics of a good PM I'd identify are intelligence and memory.

The best PM I ever had the pleasure of working with couldn't code worth a damn. And yet, he could recite details he'd heard from developers 3 weeks ago, and apply the understanding he'd gleaned to current decisions. Furthermore, he had an unvarying nose for bullshit and ability to gently push if developers were trying to make lazy decisions.

Unfortunately, I don't think that's something you can test for or train. Either someone is that type of person, or not.

> I've still not quite cracked what's different about Apple culturally that they seem to be more immune to this problem.

... Really? I do not get that impression at all after Catalina and Big Sur. Every release these days seems to have more problems than the last. I'll put up with macOS until High Sierra is unsupported and then I'm done.

As an Apple employee commented here last year, "I am awed by the fact that we manage to release any software at all, let alone functional software."[0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21218413

I'm not sure you're talking about the same "this problem" as the thread you are replying to.

I worked at Microsoft for a few years and later as a contractor at AT&T for about 2 years. I saw the 2 extremes as far as PMs go.

My PMs at Microsoft were all good at tracking tasks/projects and managing blocking issues. At a minimum they saved me a lot of headache having to answer why a task was late when I was blocked by a dependency. They also had quite a few technical PMs, my brother was actually a PM there before I started after getting his Bachelors and Masters from MIT.

AT&T's PMs were a totally different story. Not only did the PM team outnumber our dev and test teams, most of them were tasked with being product owners for insanely small features. Consider having a PM literally responsible for how a light switch works in home automation, that's the level they broke it down to. Some of the PMs lacked skill or experience, but all were expected to do very little of value and were considered to be successful if they were in meetings nonstop to take notes and give them to the next team in line.

PMs can be vital parts of a tech business, but only when they are given real responsibility and expected to create value rather than countless piles of noted and calendar invites.

I had the displeasure of using AT&T's website today and even before I read your comment, I was thinking that AT&T must have a dysfunctional "development by checklists-for-PMs" culture. The site seems like UX appropriate for an SPA, but whenever taking an action, you get redirected 4 or 5 times before landing on the page you intend...only to have some of the elements "lazy" loaded, where "lazy" means "never actually materializes."

And when working through their two-factor-auth process, I kept getting redirected to a version that wouldn't accept my one-time-password because the javascript on the page wouldn't load for some reason. The trick was to switch from Chrome to Firefox.

I wish I didn't understand why it's possible for stuff to exist on big-company websites like AT&T.

Anyway, sounds like an absolute horrorshow for both PMs and devs alike.

Just to offer a different perspective: An employer having too clear of an idea of a role can also be a red flag.

The past 10 years I've often been the first employee - or one of the first - joining or building up the company's security organization. The combination of (1) having a specialist skill and (2) being around very few other people with the same skill, naturally leads to a situation where too much clarity can be a bad thing. If a non-specialist define a security role, they will probably screw it up. And that's okay.

If you've worked in startups long enough you eventually get a lot of experience in how to hire people whose expertise you do not understand. As an employer and employee I enjoy the collaborative process of defining the role around the candidates strengths and weaknesses.

This is a huge factor in early hiring success: can you effectively hire people whose roles you don't fully understand? Can you develop trust with the person you've hired and delegate effectively?

Role clarity issues during an interview feels like going on a date with someone who doesn't know if they want to be in a relationship, or would rather adopt a parakeet.

They don't understand why they are talking to you, "but maybe you can, I don't know, maybe do something of value here, but we don't know what that is. So here's a bunch of money. FIX US".

It's usually a sign of lack of vision by leadership in the company, so they are grasping at straws.

If you want to kill your morale, look for roles like this. They are great.

Oh, I am going through that. I started as a Python Sr dev a month ago, now I am handling server which is not my expertise. They are going down, deployment pipelines are not working, when I mentioned several times, my superior answer is "You are becoming a devop ;)"...

I know they will be mad the day we deploy this to production and everything fails, but I honestly dont know what else to mention.

(In my interview I said I had minor experience deploying to AWS, but in this company they are using Azure)

Just consider it getting paid to improve your resume. Whether this project is unmaintainable won't matter when you've moved on for you 20% raise at the next company. The one you're currently working for will never give it to you.

- voice of experience -

Ha, thank you! Yeah, I am trying to remain positive, thinking that this is an oportunity to learn, etc. But at the same time i feel responsible if this fails :-/

I tend to feel responsible too, but just like, "none of us is as dumb as all of us"; teamwork ensures that your hard work can always be ruined by someone else's incompetence.

You get used to it...

While it's a great perk to be able to work on what one is most passionate about, while on the clock your focus should be to apply your skills, and learning time, to bring the most value to your employer.

Embrace the devops engineering for now - at least until you change jobs, if that's what it comes down to.

See it as a great learning opportunity.

It can be great if you have things you want to do that most companies don’t come up by themselves.

Basically if you’re in a “Shut up and hire me!” mode and will self-manage and come up with what others also need to do. I find it tiring, but some people thrive in these roles.

I enjoy this, the problem is often that key people don't actually want to change, or the core issue is somehow intractable.

Story of my entire 25 year career, right there.

That said; I've tended to look for small companies, or companies that are in startup mode, where roles do not seem very rigid, and boundaries between teams are not so impenetrable.

I tend to be miserable where roles are rigid, or the culture does not encourage cross-fertilization between teams.

> I've turned down numerous offers because when I asked what the specifics of my day to day job were going to be, the answers weren't clear.

Same, from FAANG companies. The feel that I get is more like, FAANG companies don't even know what you're going to do. They just want to hire top talent and figure out what you're working on later. They want someone "smart" who can ultimately work on any team, since whatever team you initially land on might be gone in a few months.

The consequence of this made the interview process for these companies feel much more like a "drinking the kool aid" test. When I asked what I would be doing, the sales pitch I got always boiled down to "you'll be working for X" as if that was enough. That might be enough for a fresh grad, but I'm an experienced specialist. Understanding my role and impact are key to my job happiness.

I don't think the intent is to be secretive, its more about - the people in the recruiting pipeline don't even know themselves, or if they do, you might get rearranged quickly, so focusing heavily on the specific work is more of a detriment. You kind of NEED to drink the kool aid since you're buying in to the company moreso than buying in to a specific team, work, etc..

That's because FAANG has a hiring department, that's responsible for hiring. They also each have ~2,000 engineering teams, some of which may or may not have headcount. And once someone is accepted, teams with open headcount look at that person, and make an offer.

The shortens the time that it takes to fill headcount, because there is a constant pipeline of ready candidates.

This also means that you won't get yanked around at the eleventh hour of the interview process with a "Sorry, we know you did great on all your interviews, but the headcount for the one team you were interviewing for filled/canceled earlier today, don't let the door hit you on the way out."

You get 1-5 different team offers if you pass the interview. You can speak to the managers of those teams, prior to saying yes. Those managers, if they are any good, should have a pretty good idea of what you'll be doing. If you don't like any of those teams (or their managers), you can tell your recruiter that (I said no to all 5 of my initial offers, and got 2 counter-offers), and they'll come back to you with different interested teams.

Your recruiter gets paid if you get hired. If you don't care what team you get slotted in, they'll slot you into whatever's available first. If you've passed your interviews, but do care what team you're gong to work with, they are financially incentivised to work with you.

Or you could just switch teams after 12 months, if you don't like the one you were hired into.

Sure. I mean, I get the reasoning/justification behind it. But I'm generally not interested in jumping through all of the toxic tech interview process hoops without first knowing what's at the other side; I've learned that lesson the hard way. And I think that probably filters a certain type of talent away from FAANG companies.

What's on the other side is generally above average pay, and access to ~2,000 teams, many of whom are doing very different things, that you can make a lateral transfer to relatively easily.

Yeah and that is what I mean when I say that the company is pushed forward not the work. You're buying in to the idea that you'll be paid well and that you'll probably find something you're interested in. My personal preference is to find something I'm interested in first, and join it. I'm more motivated by the team, work, problem, impact potential, etc..

I work at Google, and it's definitely true that when you're interviewing here, you should be thinking more about the company than a specific team. I mean, ultimately specific teams matter, but transferring is generally pretty easy here, not to mention common.

Can't speak for FANG, but that's certainly not how Apple works.

Leaving aside recruiting events (universities, etc.), candidates are interviewed with a specific role / headcount slot in mind. Sometimes there will be several; it's rude to drag a candidate in multiple times to talk to different teams and so sometimes several will pitch to the same candidate on a given day. But the search always starts with a team or teams that are looking for someone.

That sounds about right. FAANG companies usually need generalists because teams are so big and scopes shift often enough that the ability to pinch hit becomes an important trait. Or if they need specialists, they usually need [company]-flavored specialists, which you can't be if you didn't come from internally.

In my experience the managers usually have a pretty good idea of what work they need filled, but because the hiring pipeline produces generalists, there's some after the fact matching of interest and experience to the available list of projects.

FAANG companies need specialists not generalists. Being large companies, they have groups of people to work on dedicated aspects and technologies. Employees can have a very narrow and specialized focus.

The product they're working on might be super specialized, but oftentimes the skills needed to do the work might not be.

You're both correct! A company like Google hires both generic SWEs, who are hired without a specific project in mind, and super specialized roles like (say) wearable hardware integration engineer, who are hired to fill a very specific niche.

> They just want to hire top talent and figure out what you're working on later

FB reached out to me twice with a specific project and position proposal (SWeng/lead). YMMV

Without getting into specifics, I've had two higher up referrals at FAANG companies, for people asking me to join their specific teams. Both companies are ones who tout the ability to move laterally very easily. Both times, I went through the generic tech hiring process (as in, it had little to do with what I was being asked to do as a member of these teams), and both times, the end result was that I was unable to join the team I was referred to join.

I get that Microsoft is a huge company but the inconsistency in quality is something I find quite comical.

To pile on to the Windows control panel for a minute: If you open the start menu and search updates, you bring up the settings menu for updates. Likewise for network settings or any other section of the control panel successor.

But if you open network settings from the start menu while you already have updates open, the updates window is replaced by the network settings.

Maybe they are working towards renaming the OS "Window".

I am amazed when I see older style windows pop up alongside the windows 10 styling.

As am I, because the older style settings windows tend to actually be able to solve my problems.

What truly blows my mind is when the same settings are scattered among four different windows. See: Anything to do with sound.

Seconded - with the whole WFH explosion sound is one are where windows needs improvement.

In the old days billg / Balmer would have shouted at people until this was fixed

It’s a limitation of the phone-style applications where only one instance of a program can run at the same time. I think they addressed it in later revision of the framework, but that some people considered that was an acceptable solution on desktop shows how bad Windows have fallen from the 7 era.

It seems every update that the Sound control panel is harder to get to quickly, yet that panel still has functionality I need on a day-to-day basis. I'm willing to bet that the person who created that control panel no longer works with the company...

I've resorted to trying to figure out the shortcut names I can just type into the win+r prompt to get to a certain submenu.

e.g.:

  win+r:
    desk.cpl -> monitor resolution/refresh rate settings
    main.cpl -> mouse/keyboard settings
    mmsys.cpl -> audio device settings
    ms-settings: -> new Settings page (the : is required)

I recall being able to access a sub-page by adding something after 'ms-settings:' but I haven't yet figured out how to discover the names of the pages.

> Role clarity is a huge one in my book.

While I could agree on larger tech companies, I certainly don't count this as a red flag for startups or smaller and/or younger tech departments within larger organizations.

A lot of times managers know they need more resources and/or skills but don't have a clear idea of exactly roles are divided - and maybe it's an organization with fluid or not defined roles in the first place.

I don't think that has to be a problem at all, on the contrary I thrive in such environments.

I've been at the same company for 3 years and I'm not sure I could give you a good answer to what, precisely, the role of me or my fellow engineers are. It's a pretty flat org. I'm happy to keep it that way.

Obviously there are many people that get frustrated or miserable without clear roles and responsibilities, but I think it's important that this is relative to the individual and not inherently a red flag.

The empire building thing is the worst.

"We don't actually have anything for you to do, we just have funding for three more people, and we need to hire people for those slots or we'll lose our funding. And our team size is in the second quintile for headcount, so we need to grow a little."

So basically hiring bench warmers. I actually encountered that once in my so far 37 years. It was a total wtf moment for me.

The only place I actually encountered this was at a defense contractor where if you did not have clearance, and they didn't happen to have uncleared work ready to staff, then if they wanted to hire you, they'd have to have you do nothing for 6 months while your clearance went through. All other companies I've worked at (including FAANGs) have always had 3-10X more unstaffed work than they could possibly do with their current staff and always had something for new people to onboard into. We'd be constantly giving leadership the bad news: "We'd love to do projects A-G, but only have enough people to do A, B and maybe C."

> Role clarity is a huge one in my book.

Yes, if you want to be a cog in a machine.

That said, it seems you're complaining about FAANG-type companies. These guys are hiring "top talent" only as a defensive measure, so that upstart competitors don't get them. It's not expected for "top talent" to actually contribute to something useful.

> These guys are hiring "top talent" only as a defensive measure, so that upstart competitors don't get them. It's not expected for "top talent" to actually contribute to something useful.

Citation needed

Anec-data: Turned down an $800k Principal ML Scientist job at a FANG. Interviewed with a director who couldn't answer what I would be doing / working on. Facebook is notorious for this, lots of friends get absolutely eye-watering salaries to sit around and provide 1% lifts on click-through-rates. Most fortunately leave after the 1-yr vest.

> Anec-data: Turned down an $800k Principal ML Scientist job at a FANG. Interviewed with a director who couldn't answer what I would be doing / working on.

I agree that's weird. Edit: although when did this happen in the interview process? It's pretty common to first decide if you're interested in hiring someone in general and later do the match-making to a particular team/project. Maybe not at this level though...

> Facebook is notorious for this, lots of friends get absolutely eye-watering salaries to sit around and provide 1% lifts on click-through-rates.

It's worth it to Facebook to pay someone an absolutely eye-watering salary if they can get a 1% lift on click-through rates. This work doesn't interest me, but it's absolutely not the same as otabdeveloper4's claimed "These guys are hiring 'top talent' only as a defensive measure, so that upstart competitors don't get them."

Disclaimer: I work for a FAANG. I don't work on advertising but it obviously supports my salary.

It was a re-neg situation. I had accepted the offer, then was in talks with the director who recommended me. Unfortunately I can't say much more about that situation due to NDA.

IMHO hiring engineers to hyperoptimize advertisement platforms is a bit wasteful.

In the early part of this year, whilst on the hunt for a new job, I had the fortune(?) to interview with a FANG company (the company in question was towards the start of the acronym). They approached me, badgering for a CV (three times) and an interview, not me chasing them. And I didn't use a headhunter/outside recruiter.

Sidenote: I had taught dozens of week-long corporate training classes in software development (specifically native iOS development, Android device driver development and some ReactNative classes) to their senior staff through my training agency at this company several years prior.

I wasn't terribly interested in working at the company, because I had seen inside the machine from my earlier teaching experience and wasn't too thrilled about being a part of it, but thought the interview itself would be a valuable experience and good practice. I also expected to bomb out of the interview process early because I have heard that their algorithmic questions are notoriously hard and I consider myself a below-average developer.

I tried to get the salary expectation -- the expectation, not the negotiation -- out of the way early in the interview process but unfortunately they wouldn't come to the table so early and wouldn't even have a conversation about it.

I seemed to have done well enough during the technical part of the interview that a tentative offer was extended for a Principal role, "doing ML or something like that" was the pitch from the one wrangling the interviews. A grand but ill-defined picture was painted of roles I would be ideal for based on my years of experience and reasonably solid education (MSc CompSci, MS ML, MBA, MBA Entrepreneurship/Marketing, MA Project Management)

Towards the end of the interview process we did the usual dance around compensation and I said "$150K base and you start to have my attention, and we negotiate from there." I stated the opening figure because I was getting tired of the hemming and hawing from the other guy. I had heard of this famed, well-greased hiring pipeline but I wasn't experiencing it.

"That sounds do-able." said the person handling everything. We wrapped up quickly and then the weekend happened.

Early the next week I got an offer. I was excited! I most likely wasn't going to take the job because there were a few red flags during the interview that made me think it wasn't a company I'd be interested in working at. But to have passed the technical interview and all the other hoops! Okay! That's a small ego-boost for me even if I probably couldn't do it a second time with a different part of the FANG.

I opened up the email, and read through the offer, and read through the offer a second time to make sure I understood.

The $110K base (there was zero mention of TCO or bonuses or options or RSUs or anything else) was a significant drop from what I currently get paid (and I don't consider myself well compensated) to work on-site in the Bay area. I'm in L.A.. This was just prior to full WFH/lockdown so there wasn't even the excuse of "well you're WFH so we offer less for that."

I pinged the company back and said "That's an interesting opening offer, it's much lower than I expected for relocating to that geographic area and the position I would take, how firm are you on that number?"

"Take it or leave it." came back the one-line response a few hours later.

I didn't even bother responding.

I have heard of other people's eyes watering at their salary offers. Mine have yet to shed a single, salty tear.

Something seems off in this story. $110k base is less than the entry level salary for FANG https://www.levels.fyi/SE/Amazon/Google/Facebook

I am sure there is no evidence that I can provide, or am willing to provide, that will convince you otherwise because... "levels.fyi!"

And whilst I was overly surprised at the low offer -- $110K was the total comp, there was nothing else in there, I read the offer thoroughly, twice, because I was taken aback by it -- I also wasn't all that surprised at the low offer. I'd heard wild tales of high offers and I'd also heard tales of absurdly low offers. I was kinda caught off guard by the take it or leave it attitude.

$110K. That's all she wrote.

And after the "take it or leave it" I almost replied with "Fuck you", thought better of it, and went on with my life.

I've interviewed at two of the FAANMG over the years, and did an initial phone screen at Amazon. I turned down all three for differing reasons. The $110K was just the cherry on top of a pie decorated with little red flags.

Late to comment, but thanks for sharing this anecdote.

I've done some mentoring of junior developers in the past. Many of them get hyperfocused on levels.fyi and HN comments talking about $400K salaries from FAANG companies. This leads a lot of them to become permanently disgruntled, convinced they're being severely underpaid.

When I started mentoring, I never thought I'd have to cheer people up about $150-200K offers in medium cost-of-living cities. Too many people are convinced that $400-500K is an easy-button. This is especially true for people who coasted by at the top of their classes at average universities who aren't used to being anywhere other than the absolute top of their local community.

I would not consider myself a junior developer, or even mid-level at this point, but an offer letter with $110K salary (which I assume was total comp because there was nothing else mentioned in there) is less than what I was making 20 years ago.

This is not credible, sorry.

Issue #1: "doing ML or something like that" is not a job description that would ever make it through HR at Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, or Google. (I could imagine slightly more flexible job descriptions at Amazon, given that hiring is more team-driven there, but not to that degree.)

Issue #2: ignoring Netflix (which only has one "title" for SWEs, with pay starting at ~$300k for 2-3 YoE, but more commonly $400-450k+ at 7-8), the rest of those companies have fairly standard ranges for compensation based on level. $110k TC is below the bottom of the entry-level SWE range in SF. At a stretch, it might be the bottom of the range in Arizona or Texas (for Amazon). Entry-level, mind you.

But Principal Engineer? Amazon's Principal Engineer is the "lowest" one, where it's parallel to Staff at Google/Facebook. Comp range is pretty wide, but bottoms out at $450k. This isn't the sort of thing where a bad recruiter can screw you over; it would require getting sign-off from senior management, probably in both HR and Engineering, to make that sort of exception, but why would they bother? If you passed an interview for a Principal-level engineering role, extending you an offer of $110k would almost have to be a deliberate insult, because of how trivially you would be able to get other offers of $500k+ from the other players in the acronym.

And, in fact, there is evidence that you could trivially provide: the email with the offer. I don't expect it will be provided, even in the exceptionally unlikely universe where there exists an email from a Facebook/Amazon/Google recruiter offering someone $110k TC to work in San Francisco as a Principal-level engineering IC.

If you say so. I have nothing to prove to you and have no desire to do so. Even if I showed the email you'd claim it's fake or whatever. And I am not going to show personal email to some rando on the internet with a throwaway account simply because they question the veracity of my statement. TO be blunt, I really don't give a flying monkeys whether you believe me or not.

Yes, I'm aware. The comment was mostly for the benefit of other readers, particularly those who weren't familiar with FANG compensation policies and might have been misled into thinking that your experience was representative. Such engineers might have made a mistake costing them millions of dollars of lifetime income on that basis.

To reiterate: if you are interviewing for a software engineering role with a FANG company for a role in California, you can expect the following TC pay bands:

Entry-level (L3 @ G/F, L4 @ Amzn): $140-180k

Mid-level (L4 @ G/F, L5 @ Amzn): $200-280k (Amzn might have a lower floor, but not often)

Senior (L5 @ G/F, L6 @ Amzn): $300-400k

Staff (L6 @ G/F, L7 @ Amzn, called Principal): $450-650+

As always, there will be some exceptions. Exceptions at the bottom will tend to be web dev/full-stack roles, which at most places have slightly lower pay bands. ML roles, contrariwise, will tend to skew higher... (at least, adjusted for experience level).

I could maybe believe it, if, out of the thousands (tens of thousands?) of engineers hired at mid-level to work at Bay Area G/F/A offices in the last couple years, a few of them were offered $110k TC. It'd still require some pretty substantial deviations from their usual process, but it's imaginable. I cannot imagine that happening for someone offered a senior+ role. Like, literally, I cannot imagine what set of organizational and procedural failures would have to align for that outcome to occur. It's not worth factoring into one's calculations when deciding whether or not to spend time applying to and studying for FANG interviews.

A recruiter drops an interview on my calendar; I go where I’m told. Most likely the role has nothing to do with me or the people/projects I know firsthand. If I knew about the project I would tell you, but I don’t.

Is it that bad not knowing the specifics of your day job?

Filling gaps can be interesting too, you get to see a lot of different things, and some companies actually try to put you on jobs you find interesting.

On the opposite side, some interviewers have a model job story to tell candidates, and it may actually be your job for a month, until they shut it down and have you join the ranks of turd polishers.

I'd say an even redder flag than not knowing what you will work on is getting what looks like the only interesting job in the company.

What are good answers to your question that you have heard from hiring managers?

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