Ask HN: Ex FAANG – whats the top most thing you miss about workin in FAANG comp
Something you want your current company to do. Something you want to start similar. Something you will always carry with you.
And a high hiring bar seems to weed out dweebs and pretenders.
It also weeds out the people without solid interviewing skills who are excellent for the role but not so great in a high stakes interview.
Lastly, plenty of “dweebs and pretenders” get hired all the time. I’m in a role that might be referred to as a staff engineer or principal engineer at a big tech company, and I’ve done hundreds of interviews. The number of incompetent managers is astoundingly high. I think my company fails at this really hard. My current org doesn’t push these people out of the company but encourages them to find a position in a different organization. It’s shitty. I’ve tried to do something about it but haven’t been very successful so far.
I honestly believe if my company had this kind of talent in its earlier days, we would have collapsed spectacularly. We’ve gotten large enough now that these people are able to ride it out. And they often get brought on by managers at my level, who’re too proud to admit they made a shitty hiring decision and pretend like the problem doesn’t exist until shit is literally on fire and they have VP level escalations.
And I’ll be honest. The reason I’m bitter about this is because I’ve seen these incompetent people throw solid, hard working engineers under the bus for no reason other than to cover their ass.
People think big tech has the best and brightest minds. No, we are literally the embodiment of Office Space. “What would ya say... ya do here???”
Okay I’ll stop ranting. Bye.