Comment by evgen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evgen | Hacker News Reader

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'Good FAANG job with better work life balance"

Ha.

Ha ha ha.

The grind to get in to those jobs is similar to a banking entry job, the grind for the first few years to make a small mark and advance up the ladder is very similar, and you are still not making the same payout at the end of the road in tech. If you want the tech equivalent it would be those FAANG companies just a few years before IPO, when the payout was assured and almost certainly going to be large and when the company was still small enough to be extremely picky about hires and still expected people to have no work-life balance at all.

Concerns about work-life balance did not show up in tech (or at least was not talked about) until all of the FAANGs had already IPO'd and there was no chance for a multi-million dollar payout for enduring the grind.

>, the grind for the first few years to make a small mark and advance up the ladder is very similar,

Citation needed. At which FAANG do people work 90 hours a week? I see junior engineers working consistently 40-50 hours (FAANG ML lab), and some managers perhaps putting in 55-60. I have never even heard of people at Amazon (arguably the worst grind) putting in these hours.

These days, by the time you are grinding to make the next level and avoid the 2 year cut you are already past the point we are talking about. The post-hire grind at a FAANG is now closer to what a middle manager at GS would do; it is good money but you are not going to make more than $1M/year working at a FAANG unless you are a rock star or director level. OTOH let me tell you stories about pre-IPO Facebook or Google....

When the companies were smaller, there was far too much work and it was all high value. Therefore, they hired lots of driven people, gave them some autonomy and watched them work themselves into the grave for you.

Among many people I know who worked at FAANGs (primarily Google and Apple) from the early 00s to the present, none of this is true.

Yes, many of them worked long hours, but none of those I knew described it as a "grind", they honestly just liked their work. Certainly none of them did it to the level of sleep deprivation or damage to their physical health.

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