Comment by 120bits | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 120bits | Hacker News Reader

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Blog like this makes me wonder if I even want to work for FAANG companies anymore. I have never worked for a big corp and never for FAANG companies in particular.

>What I found was that the decent salary and excellent benefits came at a much greater cost.

I know you can get in with a big paycheck work your ass for 10 years and get out with lot of money in your bank. Maybe it my early 20s. Now I'm 35+ I don;t have the motivation to be a Google or Apple Software Engineer. I work in small firm and on interesting problems, and I'm OK with it.

> If it was after 6PM and I heard a notification on my phone, the hair on the back of my neck would stand up. Often times it was someone from work asking a seemingly innocent question.

This happens to me at my current job. But I don't have similar reaction to it. I'm more like "Oh, someone is working late..." And I respond to their queries. I believe performance and getting your task done faster has to do something? I know Amazon PIP thing is scary place to end with. No idea just read it on HN.

I work at Amazon and the work-life-balance is pretty chill. I do my 35 hours a week (7 hours a day--8 including lunch) and completely disconnect outside of that. Manager has been chill so far, expectations couldn't be clearer and are pretty reasonable.

A lot of my friends work at FAANG and finance in SWE roles too and their wlb is pretty good as well, with most working under 40 hours a week--some well under.

And we're all 1-2 years out of college. I really don't get the whole 22 year olds wanting to work a lot thing. Doesn't seem to hold true in my friend group (~10-20 samples).

You really wanna ask yourself if you wanna go thru the promo circus. What I get after a potential promo at Amazon 1.5 years from now is gonna be less than what I can get if I Leetcode hard and interview with some financial firms and unicorns so that's the route I'm planning on going. Knowing this, I don't even really need to meet expectations or try to go beyond them.

Point being: if you're willing to spend a couple hours a week keeping your interview skills sharp, you can afford to just meet expectations or even perform slightly under and stop worrying about promo and just jump ship when you get a better offer. If you go into every job with this mentality, you won't become attached to your job.

Do you get paid full time salary or hourly only for the 35 hours a week?

Like a sibling comment said, the number of hours worked isn't tracked.

Downside: If you're oncall, you might have to stay up for 18 hours straight of something big goes wrong, and you won't get paid any overtime.

Nobody counts how many actual hours you work. It's all about your impact and whether you meet your expectations. Some people are much more productive than others, manage their time better and so on... it's a double edged sword though.

This is location-dependent: in some countries (France? UK?), 35 hours a week is full time.

France is 35h but for a SWE, there's no fixed schedule and you're not paid by the hour. You get 10 additional vacation days though (so that would be 35 days total).

This blog post is a huge overgeneralization of large tech companies. You can't extrapolate from one bad experience at one team at Apple to say that all teams at Apple are bad. And you definitely can't then also conclude that all of FAANG is bad.

It's more that Apple's lows might be lower than those in other big tech companies, because conditions at Apple are permitted to get as bad as they are.

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