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Comment by ryanianian | Hacker News Reader

I had 6+ years at a FAANG. It was awful. I would never go back. I happily took a 20% pay cut to go elsewhere. This said, I learned a lot (both good and bad) and it has been a good reference point for my career.

So I recommend all engineers to strongly consider a FAANG while they're young and can tolerate a bit of burnout. Learn how the big companies do it, pay attention to what's good and what's bad, and keep that perspective with you in your career.

But be honest with yourself ahead of time about what would make you leave and follow through with that. "Golden handcuffs" of high pay is a real thing.

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Not all teams in FAANGs result in burn out or require careful through about joining. I've been at one of them for 6 years and still find my work life balance to be sane. In fact I enjoy what I'm doing quite a bit because of the business space I'm working in and the quality of peers.

what do you consider sane work life balance? I consider anything over 40h excessive

Yes. Aside from on-call week when I carry a pager 24-7 for the week but I don't work outside business hours unless paged.

Yes what? I asked "what do you consider sane work hours?" lol.

Because it was obvious, we know what full time is defined as. Anything more than 40h is more than a full time job.

Another data point: I've never felt pressured to work more than 40 hours a week, and have probably averaged quite close to that over my FAANG career. Recently, with pandemic/WFH/less-to-do-outside-work, I started working some on evenings/weekends, and my manager asked me to stop because he doesn't want to have that kind of team culture.

+1 It can create a really toxic work culture. If I do work more its because I'm interested in a problem that I don't want to let sit till next week or the following day.

In general, I try to do this discretely by not pinging people outside working hours or trying to give impression I'm working late. Working late for me is usually working through code or a design at a time when I'm caught in it and don't want to let it sit until I solve it. If this happens I'll start late next day or reduce hours following week and I make sure I call this out during standup so my team knows why I'm signing off early.

It can become a snowball when one teammate sees another working and feels compelled to do same. Kudos to your manager for calling this out.

what was wrong with it?

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