On Leaving Facebook
frantic.im
frantic.im
This is the golden piece for me. I too recently left a big corp to a smaller place, expecting to sacrifice WLB and my free time - yet I ended up feeling happier and spending less time consuming short-form online contents, to the point that I even have more free time now! It never occurred to me that my self-indulging online addiction is actually a coping mechanism towards the unsatisfying and meaningless daily job.
This is a little too first world. if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks? Does Meta not have those options?
The frustration feels almost artificial, if one does not want to get more work, then maybe just go boating or mountain biking. Watch some sports and play video games.
It’s a common obstacle to making good use of your time even when underworked and working remotely. Ideally one could find non-team settings where this wouldn’t be an issue
Are you saying that people who are dissatisfied with privileged situations shouldn't have opinions or write about them? Everything is relative.
(A) Because there's a fundamental cognitive dissonance to being able to say both "My job is important enough to stay in" and "My job is unimportant enough that I should spend a lot of time doing unrelated things."
(B) Because author doesn't want to pursue alternative hobbies with his work chunk of time. He wants to write exciting code.
(C) Because while employed, there's an expectation that you're doing the work well. If you feel like you aren't, even if you're doing as decent of a job as the system allows you to, it eats at you. Badly.
Distract yourself in a positive manner. Don't dwell on meaningless thoughts that you'll never defeat. Only way to win is to do something else with your time.
It's fine if you don't think that's the solution but straight up misrepresenting what has been said to you is not cool.
I am personally 41 and I've fought tooth and nail to not just sit at the computer for the sake of it, neither in an office nor at home. Nowadays when I sit at my desk, I have goals in mind and if I catch myself not working towards any of them in an hour, I just get up and go do something else and someplace else.
But I maintain that nowhere did I imply something as dismissive and shallow as "just don't be sad" or, not shallow but still far from what I meant, "fight this with positivity". It's not that at all, it was much more along the lines of: "find your own purpose and don't wait for others to impose theirs on you".
In my current job I am one of 3 recent hires (just recently hit the 4 months mark) and since we come from very different backgrounds compared to the company's culture, we often have 5 PRs just waiting on reviews and we find ourselves completely blocked on any further progress (can't even open other PRs since we still haven't received feedback on the current ones and that would severely change what code we should put in the new ones).
I have raised the problem multiple times, from squad leaders all the way to the CEO, but it seems that the people are cool with it and don't mind if you just twiddle your thumbs every now and then. So I started picking up more and more sysadmin skills which I need for my home NAS management and potentially other home servers in the future. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
But maybe my comment up-thread was way too short and open for negative interpretation?
I’m exactly in this spot right now. And yes, self-training on side quests like k8s or anything related to the field looks nice on the paper.
The problem comes from when 1/ you already associated all these training with the field you’re working in, and it feels helpless and boring, 2/ you still feel somehow disloyal to use your time like that.
This happened to me a few years ago. I got assigned to work on a small greenfield project solo. I had virtually full creative control, and it would solve a real imminent problem for the team. Sounds like a dream project, right? And it was for the ~1 month or so I worked on it, got positive feedback from the team, etc. However, with a stroke of a (figurative) pen, the project's no longer needed and was scrapped. The manager found more money in the team's budget.
I can't say I disagreed with the decision: often it _is_ better to just throw money to make a problem go away. I felt bummed out nonetheless. _That_ I could live with, but getting dinged for "being unproductive for a month" during performance review, now that really stung.
My story might have a happy ending though. A few months ago the same problem resurfaced, this time due to a different, company-wide constraint. The lead dev solicited solutions, and I couldn't help but feel a bit smug inside when I said "um, remember that project I worked on a few years ago? I basically have your solution on a platter." We'll see: who knows maybe the manager will somehow carve out an exception for our team. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don’t think I could have lived with that if that was done to me. I’d either resign on the spot or shortly after.
A bruised ego is a small price to pay for the safety of my family and dependents, so I will learn to live with it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it. dang, erase that GP.[0]
[0] With apologies to _In The Pale Moonlight_
Either way, I don’t expect my current employer to do something like that :)
> I felt bummed out nonetheless.
Why? Don't get emotionally involved with work done for the company. They want to toss it? Why give moments care. Your time wasn't wasted. It was done doing what they asked in exchange for pay. That's it.
>_That_ I could live with, but getting dinged for "being unproductive for a month" during performance review, now that really stung.
And that's why, you shouldn't care or get emotionally involved in the work you create for the company. The company clearly, demonstrably doesn't care about you. They do not care about you. Why should you care deeply about work you create for them?
Sure, everyone should be prepared to tolerate a level of meaningless and nonsense in the corporate world. I fully agree that one should not become too invested in work that ultimately serves the company.
Nevertheless, if humans were meant to live as sysipheans, by now we would have found more straight-forward ways of doing so, and we might even take pride in doing pointless work. Yet few if anyone is openly proud of doing nothing and still getting paid even when there's no social recourse. Naturally, when enough time passes and a person has yet to be able to actually contribute to the system, they are liable to be alienated. And why shouldn't they? If they can sit around for months or years being practically useless while still having to trade one's finite time for the privilege of food and shelter, there may be a breaking point where they can't make logical sense of the situation anymore. Where's the excitement? For many, we spend more hours at work than at home, especially if you discount sleep, and those hours are usually tired. That time at work had better mean at least something at some point; how is one then supposed to feel when they've reached senior status and... the situation is exactly the same or quite possibly worse?
It would be nice if humans could get more fulfillment out of their personal lives, but that usually doesn't come by default and rather requires considerable work on top of one's day job; family, friends, and social status all require work, and may of us don't even have adequate time for those. Is it reasonable to put a sapient mind through the anguish of being irrelevant in nearly every aspect of their lives for the promise of a distant retirement and expect them to not feel a sense of disengagement because the world is constructed in such a ridiculous fashion?
This isn't to say that you are entirely wrong, but I have to wonder if you believe that in every fiber of your being, because otherwise you could have been a burger flipper or a circus clown instead of the occupation that brings you to HN. I assume that you have a set of skills that came to you at least somewhat naturally, and that if you were unable to ever properly execute those skills that those skills (and thereby you) would seem worthless to yourself.
In my personal opinion, life is way too short to deal with meaninglessness for extended periods. If your job continues to be meaningless after years of experience, chances are you are doing the wrong thing and can benefit from a course correction.
It's GOING to happen, best not to get too caught up in it.
Going into SIEM build #8 in my life....it's just another SIEM. I take my enjoyment in the people, the compensation is adequate, it's contributing to a retirement that's getting nearer and more comfortable all the time. I try not to get too hung up on the work product.
On the one hand, if the person is not given productive work to do and decides to just go for a jog then they must be racked by guilt for being a slacker, like GP.
But if our organisations are diverting people's productive energy into unproductive waste, they need not feel any guilt about it at all since it is absolutely self-evident that this is the best and most productive of all possible economic systems.
In the first case, you are maladjusted because you are performing self-punishment to appease feelings of guilt about failing to live up to your own ideals. Another way to think about it is that you are just experiencing the inability to reconcile your basic human need to be a productive member of your community with the reality that your community is dysfunctional and has no interest or ability to provide a healthy psychological environment for its members.
In the second case, you are well-adjusted because you recognise that the society is just a machine and you are using the machine to get whatever you can out of it. Okay, it's not providing for the health and wealth of the community and the emotional needs or psychological well-being of it's constituents is either a non-goal or a goal it fails to achieve. But it does pay money. And you definitely do need money because money can provide for your physical needs. And while it can help with your other needs, you've already traded off the majority of your time and energy so, at best, you can maybe balm some of the damage that's been done by having a huge part of your life voided out.
I sometimes wonder, if I were some alien species keeping humans as animals in a zoo, would I would want to view them in this condition, or would it be too disturbing to see animals being maintained in an environment that is so impoverished?
It isn't very self-evident from my perspective, could you please explain how?
When they ask you in three years about how you have spent the time. If you convert XML requests to JSON messages for a living and not even with Spark.
I too have grappled with this for a while but I believe this struggle was for the better and it eventually led to reduced stress. Nowadays when I mentally proclaim "I am done for the day!" I know that I did my best and that I have put enough hours / effort to not feel guilty about not putting more.
So yeah, you are right. I just think people should go through this fight for discipline because it's ultimately better for their mental health when they learn to put boundaries.
It still reads too much as a very first world of a problem to me, admittedly. I recognize that us the people need to have a goal and a direction, otherwise we start feeling like aimless leaves on the wind -- but you can still do a ton of things at home (if you work remotely which you should) while checking your Slack and email every 15 minutes, no?
But if it really bothers you so much then you have to make a choice between (a) prestige / a lot of money / boredom and (b) enjoyment / medium money / purpose. Apparently in big corps you can't have both. Being stuck in a FOMO feedback loop and being unable to choose between either path is very toxic and produces a lot of internal pressure. At some point you have to choose for the sake of your mental well-being.
...Or, as other commenters alluded to, find a job that allows you to combine them. I do doubt that many other companies can give salaries in the $250K - $500K annual range though. But who knows.
As a general observation throughout my life, us the Homo Sapiens seem to suck super bad at picking a side and/or to leave a toxic relationship before it starts to poison us long-term. We must proactively work hard to periodically challenge our priorities and reassess our situation. So if you are up for an advice from a stranger: do that and do it often, something like 2-3 times a month, for whatever period of time, until you feel you finally are where you belong. We the people hold on to things for way too long. It seems to be our default mode of operation.
It also doesn't help at all that our current civilization seems to thrive on bombarding people with FOMO, sigh. But we gotta adapt and find our own way through it all regardless.
> This is a little too first world. if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks?
Where did he mention wanting more work? He mentioned unsatisfying work, I doubt doing interview loop recruiting people when you find your own work unsatisfying is gonna make you a good interviewer (and I'd hate to be the interviewee there). And take classes/training to what end? At 9 years in, I doubt there's many relevant trainings, and learning the intricate details of yet another internal proprietary system has limited returns.
> just go boating or mountain biking. Watch some sports and play video games.
None of these activities leads to finding satisfying, purposeful work, nor are they really good at negating the effects of the unsatisfying work.
Another issue is evaluating whether the juice is worth the squeeze. It's easy to say "learn a new skill bruh", but what happens when you spend the time learning something, you get hired at a new job relevant to that skill only to run into your original problem all over again? The risk of that is significant, and in the world of tech it's extremely difficult to know what a position at a company is really like because so many of us are kissing ass, and we are avoidant of any real criticism or confrontation.
None of the argumenta here are necessarily wrong, but speaking as if there are clear solutions that those complaining aren't seeing and calling this a first world problem is pretty dismissive.
because it's never that easy. If you try to get work from somewhere else maybe your manager starts to think you're bored or not interested, you definitely can't just leave and go mountain biking because then you look even lazier. So at the end of the day in every gigantic organization a substantial amount of people sits around and does nothing, that's just how it goes.
it's not first world, it's just that in bug business you're just a salaryman.
Ship it
I have one life, I need to have money to live but thats easy, actually having a positive impact is a reason to do something for someone else.
I dont necessarily apply but its its all i am thinking about untill I have value to add again: what am I doing here?
Track that over time. Make radical changes if it starts plummeting, because otherwise you're going to be backfilling entire teams' worth of vacated roles.
Find something that you enjoy doing, like you would enjoy a nice puzzle.
Purpose is all in your head.
Whether intentional or not, the tenor of this blog comes across as fairly sheltered and not particularly sympathetic.
It's not really fair to belittle stories like this with a "you know nothing of pain" mentality. Your startup founders and bootcamp attendees would sound similarly sheltered if set against stories of starving children in Africa. Should we all refrain from talking about our pains because someone else's pains are worse?
Humans struggle everywhere, with different things, and it's helpful for us to learn from people who've been through similar.
For a while, I spent my days mostly doing tutorials, reading ebooks and papers, watching lectures, ...
Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible luxury to get a consistent salary and be able to do that! But the thing is, you can't help but feel utterly useless after a while. It's especially bad if everyone else has their projects, so you also don't really feel like part of a team.
So it's very understandable that if 1 of 3 is missing your psyche becomes strained.
I used to study this theory as part of my game design interests and found it extremely useful to analyse a lot of stuff from your own situation to a game or even customer experience. Just be aware of the word perceived here... allowing the theory to be used for dark patterns.
For what it’s worth, almost everyone I talked to before leaving had the same take as what you described—that I should do the safe thing and just keep working there because the pay was high and it was relatively easy. I thought I was going crazy, because it seemed so obvious to me that I needed to move on.
Sounds like you had plenty of chance to fulfil your needs for free time, and the ability to pursue your own curiosity and carry out intellectual inquiry. Which is definitely nice, and which most people lack the time and space to do (I imagine friends and family telling you that it sounds like a dream job, etc.).
But I think anyone who has been in that situation knows that after a while, it's kind of a nightmare :)
> GP: It never occurred to me that my self-indulging online addiction is actually a coping mechanism towards the unsatisfying and meaningless daily job.
The worker no longer trusts that they won't be a replaced by a machine. The investor no longer trusts that they will get a return on capital. The manager no longer trusts that they will have employment for life after more than a bad quarter or two.
With so much of our trust eroding, management is left with little else to hold on to, and so they grasp the false hope of blunt instruments like forced rankings and quarterly forecasting — no matter how illusory it all may be.
...We seem to have a false sense of joining something when we enter companies these days, just as Rousseau stipulated society had entered into a false social contract. This may be what's driving newer generations to look for "purposeful work" as they launch their careers: They are looking to take control by demanding meaning from work right from day one...
But Rousseau also had the idea that humans can remake themselves via their institutions, and Deming appears to share this belief.
This is what's so interesting about companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple. These rare birds tend to operate outside of our norms and customs: They educate their employees differently; they collaborate differently across silos and divisions; they incentivize people in different ways. Because of their overwhelming ability to make cash (either initially through giddy investors and eventually via customers) these companies appear to start out more like communes. They are Gardens of Eden where there is little fighting for resources and oftentimes even the core customers freely partake.
Moreover, these companies almost appear to be for the common good, and the management appears to instinctively follow Deming's philosophy. But what's even more striking is that efficiency and performance naturally improves inside of these companies without the standard methods that more established firms pursue. Sadly, there's often also a fall from grace that typically happens as these corporations become "normalized" and a more traditional battle for resources sets in.
Perhaps the answer lies deeper in what Deming was trying to say about "profound knowledge." As Deming implied, we work in complex systems with forces of good and evil always in play, and it may just be that the single most important responsibility of our top leaders is to artfully mold and shape this dynamic in a way that best suits their organizations — and produces a self-selecting ecosystem of workers, partners, customers, and shareholders who naturally align.
All of this implies a more-progressive approach to leadership. And yet we all too easily succumb to our Taylor-like impulses that assume the worst about workers — using automation to track productivity down to the nanosecond, if possible. Unfortunately, this tends to exacerbate the growing trust gap between workers that festers between our corporate silos and stymies the very productivity that we seek to enhance.
None of this is easy. And many of us will surely struggle with these issues throughout our entire lives. But in a world where the stakes appear to be getting higher by the minute, building lasting trust and cooperation across companies and communities — binding together people and long-calcified silos — may be the only way for the corporation to survive.
hbr.org, The management thinker we should never have forgotten (2016), https://hbr.org/2016/06/the-management-thinker-we-should-nev...
I currently work at a large fintech company and have a decent salary. I have been there for quite some time now so I have the reputation and trust in the organization however, I am having the worst time of my career. I can also barely work a few hours a day and I feel horribly burnout. Hence I made the opposite decision - to move to one of the FAANGs where I will massively shift my current WLB. I am confident that I made the right decision.
The work is primarily organizational/drudgery and moves at a slow pace because of all the red tape and walls they've built around their projects in order to manage all the people. Endless incremental code reviews for small changes that get pondered for days and days. Design docs for trivial features written up and then basically entirely reworked by comments from people higher up who have more information but no time to do it because they're too busy being higher up and writing design doc comments all day. Horribly inefficient, painful to get anything done, and demoralizing.
Just left Google after 10 years. I found in that time I spent more time trying to find where I fit in and what work I could even do than actually doing any work. In some parts of the company, any interesting project was like a piece of red meat thrown into a pack of hungry wolves looking for "impact". Any project "given" to you quickly got competed with or downgraded in importance unless you got super self-promotional. There'd be talk about some new exciting thing coming down the pipe and you'd eagerly wait months for it to find out the work was either already parceled out or it didn't really exist.
I ended up seeking our "boring" organizations and projects within the company, in order to avoid the frustration and drama. But then motivation suffered.
Oh, and remote work has made them even more terrible because it's even more asynchronous and ponderous now. Can't tap someone on the shoulder and run something by them really anymore, it's just more "fork many threads of work and then spin on all the blocking issues waiting to make progress on any of them". Which sucks if you are the kind of person who is better at picking one thing at a time and sinking your attention into it, like me. So yeah, at some point you just start to lose focus out of sheer annoyance/frustration/boredom. And you're just there to collect the paycheck.
And maybe you feel guilty about it, but then, that was kind of the point. Maybe in your previous job you were a top contributor, potentially competing with BigCorp in some domain. Now you're not. They can push wheelbarrows full of money around to do the thing you were doing before, but at way higher scale and precision... but at the cost of way lower velocity because they've employed PhDs to nitpick over the comments in a protobuf description. (And if you leave and start your own thing and compete, they'll probably just come and buy it and bury it, too.)
They're bad for our industry and not so great for our brains... but good for our wallets. 10 years at Google messed up my passion and skills.... but it sure was good for my mortgage.
(FWIW, I thought in that time that I had lost my passion for coding. But two weeks after leaving to take some time for myself, I found myself firing up CLion and writing a synthesizer from scratch and loving it. Writing code is great.)
> These BigCorps are hiring like mad and paying big $$ to fill seats more for the purpose of starving their competition of brains than actually using the brains they hire.
I used to apply Hanlon’s Razor to these types of hypothesis. After spending more time with the decision making class, the amount of psychopathic behavior and analysis I’ve seen has let me to reconsider.
Not speaking from any inside knowledge, BTW. Just my philosophizing.
I see it as an invasive vine using all its spare energy to block out the canopy and choke out the forest. Rather than a native tree that uses spare energy to bear fruits, which nourish various critters who in turn contribute to a more efficient and robust ecosystem.
In even my most over-resourced client, there is never a paucity of improvements to make. Ever.
My current working conclusion after seeing this many times and doing what I can to informally coach the ones expressing this kind of sentiment, is that there isn't a lack of meaningfulness, or purpose, or other lofty language. There is a lack of will to go outside of their comfort zone, very often due to non-technical factors. Or a lack of a sense of joy in the craft in even the smallest details and accomplishments. And that's okay. It's the reason we use specialization.
But let's not kid ourselves. I've yet to walk into a client that is so on top of their to do list much less wish list that there is nothing to improve. We also need to recognize there is also a substantial subset of people expressing this sentiment who dislike implementing some improvement without significant recognition, praise, and advancement; these are the ones who seek the big, splashy wins over the steady, incremental attention to craft that accumulate into the 20-year overnight successes.
What I have gathered from those who do is that it's not that there's a shortage of problems to solve in the organization, it's that the bureaucracy is so thick that they couldn't solve extra problems even if they tried.
From your references to "clients" I assume that you work as a consultant of some description. Obviously, no one brings in a consultant without having a lot for them to do. Additionally, few orgs bring in a consultant with the intention of them doing only what they're told.
But if you're just one coder among tens of thousands, that's exactly what your organization expects of you. And that's what the people who tell these stories find so draining.
This is why I called out "...very often due to non-technical factors" of what I found when I dug deeper. It is very rare I find the bureaucracy "too thick", and much more often, I find first a lack of communication, and if the communication is clarified, second I find a lack of desire to work on unglamorous, tedious, time-consuming aspects of the extra problems.
A frequent example: developer has an idea how to improve and existing process. Developer is informed they need the buy-in of SRE, Devops, and NOC teams. The presentations are made, and the team representatives/managers/directors Swiss cheese the idea pointing out all sorts of gaps to address. Endless forms to fill out, approvals to obtain, more presentations to give. Developer is dejected, and comes onto HN to say it's impossible to improve at BigCo.
When I ask what could it hurt to reach out more than halfway to those teams and find out what it would take to use this experience as an exercise to create and document a "minimal integration with stakeholder teams" package that all future projects can base themselves off of, I get met with "but it's not worth it", or "that's too much hassle", and similar fend-off-the-now-not-so-quick-hit-project explanations.
Except here's the clincher for me: I have yet to meet a BigCo team that has done this even for their big projects. No one wants to do the documentation work, nor the documentation maintenance work, because assistive infrastructure enablement isn't incentivized on annual performance reviews, only what sounds like "new progress" going up the leadership chain.
Every project ends up as a bespoke process to integrate into other teams' processes and mechanisms. The bureaucracy is so thick because no one spends the time trying to document, much less automate what processes look like from other teams' perspectives. And this is one of the pillars of my current working conclusion: everyone agrees there is constant documentation maintenance that needs to be performed everywhere, but in all these discussions, extremely rarely do I see someone say, "yeah, I use the extra time to learn some new procedure/tech, and update the onboarding/how-to documentation from the perspective of a newbie" (hugely valuable IMHO), and tons of other people slapping their foreheads and scurrying off to do the same.
Even thick bureaucracy its very self can be addressed with extra time, and that is arguably one of the most frictionless actions to take; pick up the phone/chat/email and start writing what you find out. That so, so few people kvetching about all this "boring extra time" make this frictionless action their revealed preference signals volumes to me.
I want to stress it's fine that people don't want to do this kind of work. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. But so far I haven't bought into the commonly-accepted wisdom why "soul-crushing extra time" exists in our industry, with exceptionally rare variations (like defense-related highly-compartmentalized or similar contexts).
Allmost every addiction is like this. A shallow replacement for the real desires unfulfiled.
It’s simple, silly me, I consider work a big part of my life. And given the fact that I have to do it for living anyway, it *must be* gratifying.
When I got to therapy, we traced it mostly to the internal critic (schema therapy). It was gone just like that with a flick of a finger almost! I have been productive and having fun with my life for two months leading up the this new year. When suddenly my manager decided that he does not stimulate me enough. He started getting deep into my ways of working saying something like “he does not understand how I perform my tasks and how they progress”, he started moving some not urgent tasks in ways he saw as better than my plans. He did not notice his direct spending 6-7 hours a day instead of 1 and he sarted really pushing and critiquing me and my teammate in a way that even our wives heard some changes during the zoom calls. It lead to a huge nervous breakdown for me. Two weeks passed by in a recess and now I slowly regain myself back.
But my views towards big corp are finalized: some cog a little bit higher than you can at some point decide that he has a right for any method to increase his perceived impact on team’s productivity and you will get hit.
I love myself a little bit more than this, gotta figure out the financial side a bit. The view towards “being fired” has shifted a bit too, now I think that if you’re not close to being fired based on your performance, the pay you too little and you work too hard (for them!) Work hard for yourself, don't work (too) hard for THEM!
Oh shit I must sound so priviliged, but yep this is the place I’m at right now
A note of caution that this is not the common Facebook experience. I joined being fully aware of their reputation for poor work life balance, but even then it was soul-crushing. The pressure to perform is near constant, consequences of not performing are real, and the bar for meeting expectations is very high to start with, such that externally hired senior engineers are frequently overwhelmed by the sheer amount of expectations.
I was a manager there and got the distinct impression that the expectations bar was also rising over time. FB/Meta tends to hire the overperforming types, who put extra pressure on themselves to get those Exceeds and Greatly Exceeds ratings that come with real monetary rewards. The problem is you can't have everyone exceeding, not at the macro level anyways. So there's a real pressure on the managers with too many of those Exceeds ratings. The goal is to prevent a manager that misunderstands the expectations from giving everyone Exceeds, but the side effect is that over time there is a drift of expectations from Exceeds to Meets side. Having been with the company for so many years, the author likely did not notice this drift and was able to adjust over time naturally. Newer hires (which, given FB's rate of growth, is the large majority) aren't so lucky.
The other thing is that for many people, getting a normal Meets All rating is totally fine. You don’t need to push yourself to Exceeds level.
Why do we make this the gate keeper to our industry when we know (except for the very specific roles) we will rarely need leet code type problems. When we do we just google them.
So silly to me.
And that you just don't particularly see a need to cater to other people's made up (and sometimes downright farcical) rituals to such an excessive degree.
No matter how much money they may dangle in front of you.
> And that you just don't particularly see a need to cater to other people's made up (and sometimes downright farcical) rituals to such an excessive degree.
> No matter how much money they may dangle in front of you.
I confess to not understanding this take, money can purchase back a substantial portion of time. Working at big tech can fairly easily reduce your working life to 10 years if you spend conservatively. Outside of big tech the norm seems to be more towards 20-30.
The cost of those decades of saved time? About 100ish hours of prep for your first interview, 40-50 from there on (based on personal experience, conversations with my colleagues, and a friend who runs a FAANG interview class). Assuming 3 job hops in your 10 year working life, that's 200ish hours to save 20 years. Is there a reason you don't think that's worth it?
(1) Most chiefly, the egregiously unethical behavior of nearly all of the "big" players (the rest being merely moderately unethical)
(2) Reports from close friends of the day-to-day grind at these places (literally none have anything more than superficially positive to say about it; some have suffered significant health problems, include one full-scale nervous breakdown)
(3) And the intellectual dishonesty implicit in the LC process also, but only as icing on the cake, as it were.
And independent of all that - it is by no means a binary (either you work or for big tech, or you grind along at for an extra decade or two at middle range). There are high-paying opportunities out there, if that's what you're out for -- they just aren't as immediately obvious to find as FAANG.
Sounds like you'd need to spend some time to find these :)
To your other points, I get feeling revulsion to Google or Facebook, but I feel there are other companies like Netflix or Stripe that are ethically fine. The idea that the employees are generally overworked doesn't mesh with my lived experience the bay area, I have a fairly wide social circle and I don't know anyone putting in more than 40 hours a week at a big tech company unless they're trying to climb the ladder super fast. I think we also may have to agree to disagree on whether all leetcode is intellectually dishonest. 4 leetcode hard problems is a silly way to interview, but when working on problems at scale I appreciate a gut check problem on big O and an algorithmic workhorse like depth-first search or something.
Meanwhile your data points on 'N' and 'S' are appreciated and I will add them to my (mental) notes.
No I won’t get a job at a FAANG this way, but I’m not particularly fond of megacorps.
I've interviewed at plenty of them (only one in recent years, though) and while I wouldn't say they were easy, they aren't doing completely irrelevant challenges like leetcode.
I've certainly never studied for one, unless you count flipping through a book or two just to remind myself of things I may not have thought about in a while. Like 1-3 hours tops.
Yeah, older people are more likely to have other priorities, but they’re also more likely to be financially secure and thus able to trade money for time to study. Also, they’re more likely to have gained time management/prioritization skills and discipline that they could apply toward studying.
Ultimately it seems like arguing that older people lack time or inclination depends on ageist stereotypes.
I could never go back to university for that reason - studying, fine, I did a ton of courses on edX and Coursera, but I pick what interests me and a lot of test problems you are given (at least in my experience, at university and later online) too often are more about understanding the intent of the person creating the problem rather than anything useful. I could also never go back to the army (Germany, mandatory service, battle tank mechanic) and take commands from some guy who just wants to posture.
I'm not any less willing to study than I was at university - but now I refuse to do what I think is useless or meaningless. Studying for tests is high on that anti-list. Not all tests, I had no issues with tests I took for things that needed certification, e.g. sailing or for the pilot license, but that stuff was useful in practice and not nearly as over the top because those tests were not designed to "weed out weaklings".
EDIT: An anecdote for that last phrase
After writing the comment I got curious and googled that exact phrase. I found this in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Smythe_(physicist)
> He authored a textbook on electromagnetism called Static and Dynamic Electricity, which was a widely used reference in the field during the 20th century. His electromagnetism course was modeled after the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos examinations and designed to "weed out weaklings." Smythe's course was so infamous that future Nobel Prize in Economics laureate Vernon Smith switched to electrical engineering from physics to avoid it.
Why is it weird that people should spend time preparing for ask for a new job? I mean, ask an orchestra musician how much time they put into preparing for auditions, or how much time many degreed professionals put into passing a certification (e.g. the bar exam or medical boards).
If you don't want to spend time preparing for job interviews, then fine, don't. But don't claim "discrimination" when there are those of us willing to sacrifice to put in the hours to prepare.
Does seem like there is a growing movement to explicitly not do leetcode style reviews at many places which is good.
Training is basically the main work performer has to do to earn his life, and all training is valuable. You could compare with professional athlete and see how it’s absurd.
> If you don't want to spend time preparing for job interviews, then fine, don't.
The idea is that you have to understand the process. If you don’t see the point of certain exercise, you search for a rationalization, and discrimination looks like a good one. Also, the discrimination is not against people that won’t train for interview, but to give a bias to people that don’t evaluate returns on their invested time
By and large, professional musicians are paid for a standard level of performance competence and a strong level of versatility. The small handful of remainders are the famous ones renown for exceptional levels of performance.
Plenty of professionals are paid to play the musical equivalent of e-commerce site.
Pretty much anyone can do that. We’re looking for someone who can do the other 20% of the job that’s novel and difficult. Ideally someone who recognizes that rereading glue code is a waste of human effort, and automates it away instead.
Additionally, I find the logic behind this strange. It implies that just because some people can afford to sacrifice that this setup isn’t discriminatory. But the criticism is that some demographics are disproportionately unable to sacrifice. Discriminatory doesn’t mean no on in that demographic is able to afford to dedicate whatever resources towards the thing. In fact systems of discrimination often work better when there’s a model minority or “one of the good ones” that can be pointed to as an example as to why a discriminatory system isn’t really a problem.
Doctors have to recredential over their whole career. Used to be every ten years, but some specialties are moving to annual “quiz-sized” credentialing over once-a-decade cramfests.
It's weird because the preparation is often the thing we're not doing in our day to day.
I'd also go as far as saying if you need to cram crazy hours shortly beforehand to pass any exam or test then you're not really qualified to pass. If you were qualified you wouldn't have to do this because you'd already comfortably know the answers. I get wanting to casually review the finer details which is fine, but if you're in "oh crap, it's Tuesday and the test is in 3 days, time to drop my life and cram 10 hours a day to prepare" mode, maybe you're not ready?
I also think you can't compare software development to musicians or sports. I do play the guitar and there's a massive amount of muscle memory involved. I've gone a few years without playing in the past but within a few minutes of picking it up somehow my brain can resume where it left off and my hands just move to the right places almost on their own.
The same can be said for sports, there's a lot of practice and warming up to burn in muscle memory and literally get your physical body in an optimal state. Also the stuff you're practicing is directly applied to what you're "really" doing in your professional day to day.
Tests are different because you are on a timer and they are balanced around it. I almost got straight A's in university, apart from a single B in a course I was confident I actually understood. I got A's in shit I couldn't even begin to explain. But signals and systems, which I genuinely understood at the time, I got a B because I didn't bother studying and memorising shit. I had to work stuff from first principles and ran out of time.
I feel like it's the same in programming interviews. There's no time to actually work out anything from first principles or any original thoughts. Either you know the answer immediately and you spew some shit to make the interviewer happy, or you fail.
Like you say, it's very different for physical activities (can't comment on music), because you cannot drastically increase performance by cramming for a few hours. I was an amateur powerlifter, I stopped training when covid started. There's no way I can get my strength back in 3 days. But I bet I can get an A in some random exam after cramming for 3 days in some random university course I did however many years ago.
I've had a professor who said that the purpose of an exam is to study for it.
The same professor said that if you don't learn something in an exam, then the exam is useless.
Because that preparation, by and large, is not related to the actual job.
> I mean, ask an orchestra musician how much time they put into preparing for auditions, or how much time many degreed professionals put into passing a certification (e.g. the bar exam or medical boards).
Those are all instances of people being asked to do/know things that they will need to do/know for their actual jobs. An actual comparison would be if the orchestra musician was asked to perform blindfolded on a random piece of music, and have to spend 6 months training to memorize the most often requested pieces to be ready for the interview, only to play for the rest of their career with the sheet in front of them. (Not trying to compare difficulty, but absurdity. I don't doubt orchestra musician's auditions are harder)
Also, bar exam and certifications are not job interview. You also have exams and certifications in CS and no one is complaining about having to train for those. A lawyer/doctor certainly doesn't have to pass the equivalent of the bar/medical exam every time they want to change firm/clinics. They just talk about their past experiences. Barely any prep required beside being able to give a good sales pitch about you.
Meanwhile, as a dev, you are expected to do it all over again every time you will change job. Even for internal moves, many of the GAFAMs expect you to go through this again.
Granted, it's more representative than leetcode performance but still far from a perfect system.
A bit off topic, as this isn't orchestral music, but in college I was in a couple of bands as a bassist, and in one of them the guitarist was probably one of the best musicians I ever played with technically. However, because he was so good, sometimes he would get taken by surprise when someone less talented in the band messed something up during a performance. When practicing before one of our gigs, I noticed that our rhythm guitarist was playing a certain section incorrectly and essentially finishing it in half the time he was supposed to; the drummer and I would generally catch on immediately and course-correct, but the lead guitarist tended to be flummoxed and took the longest to group up with everyone. I made sure to mention it to everyone since I figured it might come up again, but I think everyone else forgot by the time the gig happened, and the same exact thing happened, and even though it was the rhythm guitarist who made the initial mistake, the lead guitarist ended up being the one who "looked" the most wrong to the audience because the drummer and I knew that the only way we'd get back on track was grouping up with the rhythm guitarist and leaving the lead guitarist behind. If anyone were trying out our two guitarist to join an existing group, I think almost everyone would take our lead guitarist due to how much better he'd perform in an audition. However, if the band he tried out for wasn't able to keep up with him, it's very possible he would have been the wrong choice. This seems pretty similar to "leetcode" style interviews for a software engineering role; the person who is able to impress the interviewers the best technically might end up being a bad fit for some teams if they aren't able to collaborate as effectively with their team.
TBH, depends on the job.
I think the problem is hiring people with these skills to do jobs that don't require them. That's bad for both parties. The employer is going to be paying for a skill it is not required, and the employee will get bored and switch jobs, costing everyone time and money.
They only do it once, though, not for every single interview.
Interviews are by definition a legal way to discriminate.
To be clear, I dislike the current way interviewing is, but do you have a better solution to screen out 7,000 applicants? The vast majority will be knocked out by the leetcode style interview, and sure, some brilliant minds might fail because they can't remember linked lists in the moment, but atleast you screened down from 7,000 -> 70. If there is a better way, we'd all love to know.
I am prepared for this to be voted down, but I am genuinely wondering the answer to this.
I've been in organizations that were spawned by both of the above extremes. The former is definitely more pleasant to work in (everyone is at least competent) even if the interview was much less pleasant to do. I do feel like more orgs should try to target the middle ground instead of just aping Google and going ham on the leetcode shit.
My belief is that if you aren't doing Ph.D. level research, all you need to do is get the candidate to prove they can write themselves out of a bag with React/Python. Anything else is overkill, and a real cost loss to the business in terms of money and time.
I will admit that for most businesses there will be times to do the first, and time to do the second. But I imagine this distribution is something like 20/80, whereas most companies are doing 80/20.
Coding is hard, but so is marketing, accounting, management ... But are your marketing candidates being put through the ringer too? I suspect software engineers are being uniquely hazed.
Peace & Love
My girlfriend works on the business strategy side of Fortune500’s. Our interviews look like a joke compared to theirs.
That’s kinda what they do.
You are put through an initial ringer to vet for basic fit and competence. Then you get a take-home exercise that consists of several business case studies. You have to detail a strategy for what you would do in that situation, support your argument with research, etc. My girlfriend said it’s a lot like writing a term paper in college.
Last time she interviewed it took her I think 2 or 3 days of full-time work to do the case studies.
Then you go back and defend/present/discuss your work at an interview.
Her job consists of doing basically that, but with a team, larger consequences, more direct ownership, and loooooonger processes because so many people get involved in everything. Her team is strategizing what could become a trillion dollar product (in like 10 years) if they get it right. It’s pretty cool.
I've always been of the opinion that a take home software engineering project that I can present in the interview would be preferable. Coding alone for a few hours and then being able to get all my ducks lined up.... Sounds like a practical and great interviewing process to me.
He's now doing two jobs at the same time and the companies don't notice he's barely doing anything but appearing in meetings.
YMMV
Big corporations are incredibly wasteful, so I'm not surprised.
I also know plenty of developers who do little at work, but at least they need to produce a substantial amount of code, at the end of the day.
I've never had to prepare for an engineering interview in some 15 years of doing this professionally.
> the job takes way less effort compared to software
The easiest part of my job these days is writing code.
The challenging fun part is setting a technical strategy that aligns with the business and gardening the team around me with soft influence towards that strategy. Super challenging. Would've been easier to just do it myself, but there's only so much I can do on my own.
Ultimately, you should go do whatever comes to you easiest and/or is most fun. No sense grinding away at something you're not good at. Maybe your friend has an immense talent for business and strategy.
And yet, all these companies would have complicated hiring pipelines to hire. I have seen examples which made me laugh; like receiving tens of cvs and asking almost all of them for take home exams (felt sorry for the reviewers and the candidates who lost their time), multi stage technical reviews for companies with less than 10-20 employees, final executive level interviews with more than 5 candidates in parallel, time to hire times of 3-6 months, etc.
But if I must write code as an applicant, it better be similar to real world tasks and not some bullshit, especially if my chances of getting hired are still slim. Having to do work in order to get hired is literally sucking the lifeforce out of me, so don't suck even more out of my via the agony of glorified brain teasers.
Do you have any hard data behind that ratio?
Or are you just kind of ... making those numbers up?
Because they, you know, "feel right"?
I concur with the parent's point. HN is perpetually complaining about tech interviews, but nobody ever suggests a viable alternative that can cope with such application volumes.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/17/heres-how-many-google-job-in...
The parent poster was literally saying that LC screening by itself will get you your 99 percent reduction.
The actual hiring ratio at google is something like 0.2%. They pass over 998 out of 1000 applicants, so no matter what they do, they'll pass over a substantial number of qualified people, and no matter what they do there will be complaints on HN.
It was this resorting to made-up numbers that I found to be kind of weird.
While remote positions can certainly receive a lot of "noise applicants", as I discovered in my last job, you can filter out half, if not more, on just a quick pass. Most companies are dealing with dozens of candidates at the most, often less. Certainly not thousands of them.
If they "cheat" by having stack overflow do their work for them, but they can explain it well enough, they probably understand the concepts at least.
Not a great metric, but is there a replacement? Not everyone has github side projects to see how their code actually looks.
It’s easy to study leet code, and it’s relevant because it shows the interviewer you can write code.
I’ve had non-leet code interviews, like write some feature in 60minutes. It was fine. It tests code and knowledge as opposed to just algorithms and tricks.
I dunno I’ve always felt that the people who can’t leet code are the ones that complain about it. The ones that can just spend a bit of time to practice and ace the interview.
You mean the ones that randomly receive a random problem that they hadn't memorized before.
I'd say a lot of us learn about algorithms and data structures early in their career. But most of them are guidelines, not rules. So, you just remember how to google for them, not learning specific ones by heart. No one has ever told me: You need to work on this string manipulation and be done within 30mns.
So I dunno, it’s not fun doing the gimmicky leet code questions but it definitely filters candidates.
I think people in this thread take them for granted… many candidates struggle with them. The ones that think they’re easy and you just gotta study a little bit — they’re honestly probably pretty smart.
I have a million things I want to learn about. If a potential employer would rather I spend time on what amounts to trivia, then great, I don’t want to work there.
> I’ve had non-leet code interviews, like write some feature in 60minutes.
This is also a problem because it’s impossible to understand the constraints, context, specifications, etc. during this time. When I am asked to implement a feature in the real world, it takes time to understand the domain and context. Writing code is usually the last and easiest bit. It also never occurs that you need to understand and complete something in just an hour or two.
So in leetcode interviews you’re asked to turn on a bunch of knowledge you don’t really need. And in implement this feature interviews, you need to turn off a bunch of important knowledge and experience.
Both are irritating interviews.
The best way to interview, in my experience, is to ask about a project or projects someone has worked on. Even better if there’s time for them to present on it. That way you get a real world picture of their skills, they are comfortable, and you can ask detailed questions without jumping the shark. Further, it is perfectly reasonable for someone to be required to present and answer questions over something they’ve worked on in an hour or two. That does happen in the real world.
This doesn't scale and introduces a bunch of biases on other dimensions. People who don't have time to prepare for leetcode interviews might be the same ones that don't have time to work on FOSS, and it could be that they can barely talk about their past work for IP issues. It's also way easier to fake your way through a high-level discussion of a software engineering project (that the candidate prepared) than through a leetcode interviews.
I've interviewed hundreds of people over my career and I've never had an interview where I couldn't figure out their technical abilities through a conversation.
I'll tell you what leetcode interviews do find you though, they find you people that have no idea how TCP/HTTP work, they have no idea how you would debug a distributed system. They've never deployed anything to a server. They probably have no idea how to even measure the amount of work being performed by a server. They've never thought about CI/CD/Deployment/Scalability. They've never used any cloud resources. They have potentially never been through a code review.
etc, etc, etc, etc.
Someone crushing a leetcode test tells me about 1% of the stuff I'd like to know about their knowledge and abilities.
Some solutions are rejected on the spot (bad practices, does not solve the task correctly), other candidates are invited for a technical interview. Some generic questions, then we go through the solution - with emphasis on less than perfect areas. It is quite easy to see when someone is bluffing, and you also see how the person deals with feedback.
I am exceptionally good at algorithms problems and I recognize it is not a useful skill I want to filter on when hiring. A dev team of 20 may only need a few to really understand algorithms to look over relevant pull requests. and even then such situations may be rare
I've interviewed at a lot of other places and it's mostly take-home assignments or just talking about past projects or my open source projects. I've never had to do leetcode for an interview in 14 years of working as a software engineer.
It’s hazing. Nothing more.
That being said I’d rather work for a shop that had at least some code tests. I’ve worked in places with none and the code quality is about as shifty as you’d expect.
More realistic explanation: they try to make an 'American Idol' like process, this gives them the feeling of having chosen 'the best'. Now it probably takes some standardized task to do that kind of competition, as it is necessary to maintain the claim of having an objective hiring process.
I was once told, that in the olden days there was a different kind of hiring process (that was not about programming jobs, actually, they didn't have that job at the time). It would go as following: the owner would invite the candidate to join the crew for lunch, if the candidate eats a lot, then he would count as a good worker. Actually that would make a good test for 'culture fit'...
BTW, the article has a link to a free course on hiring practices, thanks for the link! https://course.jobsearch.dev/01_introductions/01_course_intr...
I've thought this too. Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, Pixar, and Lucasfilm were hit with antitrust litigation starting around 2010 because they were all involved in colluding to reduce the ability of devs to switch jobs. Since then we've only seen the rise of leetcode style interviews. We're way way past the days of tree traversing and FizzBuzz. We're asking candidates to recite Dijkstra's but pretend they've never seen it before. It's just way more convenient for tech companies if people don't leave in the first place. I know I've stayed at my job much longer than I should because I hate interviews.
> as it is necessary to maintain the claim of having an objective hiring process
Yeah no one wants to admit they don't know what they are doing. It's bad for FAANG myth-making. A company the size of Google or Facebook is never not hiring. They are a big boat that can't just stop moving like that. They have a constant churn rate, the need to keep interviewers sharp, and a certain target rate they need to hit of applicants in, new employees out. All the process between the in side and out side is Scientology. It's just complete fabricated cultish nonsense. The owners of LeetCode must be enjoying it though.
I didn't know that, really interesting detail.
>no one wants to admit they don't know what they are doing.
Interesting perspective, though I don't know about the vodoo part. They seem to be taking the matter quite seriously, at least google does. Take the matter of competitive programming: Peter Norvig says they were checking, if taking part in programming contests would correlate with good performance at the job [1]; I think having read somewhere that Norvig revised his negative judgement later on, as they had examined more data [2]. (actually that would mean that they didn't act on the data to begin with, well well).
These companies are good at data processing, any data that is, at least they seem to be taking it dead seriously (disclaimer: I never worked at google, though I have managed to fail at interviewing there, however i am not sure if i would have accepted an offer ;-)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdmyUZCl75s
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_programming#Benefi...
If any of these companies knew what they were doing then they wouldn't require multiple interview rounds. I expect the correlation between one's ability to perform at Google with their ability to pass the interview gauntlet to be no better than a coin toss.
But I guess, that this is all speculation..
I do nothing that looks anything like leetcode whatsoever.
Most startups I have applied to previously rarely asked ds/algo interview questions.
It's not that they want to, it's that they have to.
You have 10 dev positions in your team. You receive 5000 applications, where 3000 look like a suitable match based on the CV. How do you proceed?
Grinding leetcode also shows you've got grit, and are willing to prepare for a task and do what it takes to succeed.
Grind leetcode, show the companies that you can meet their minimum threshold of cognitive and executive capability for entry into their tech department... or don't work for them, it's that simple.
This is not about having to use leetcode type problems in day to day work.
Knowing about those is about a state of mind and a culture: that you are passionate about tech and have what it takes intellectually to dig very deep into it and not just another drone that learnt Java just because you knew it would give you a decent-paying job.
You’re right though — I might as well be saying they were also incredible bakers or skaters. If those were also high signal identifiers of good devs then we’d be kneading dough while doing ollies in the interview rooms.
What irks our industry is that there are plenty of good developers out there that produce quality day to day plumbing and integration work that suck at leetcode. That’s fine. We should hire them too, but if you are FAANG you don’t need to if you have post grad leetcoders knocking down your door every day of the week to supplement your already burgeoning cadre of sensible staff engineers.
You don't have to dribble the ball, you don't have to answer a quiz about the rules of the game, you don't have to tackle anyone, you don't have to kick the ball, you don't have to be good at positioning yourself.
Clearly the test seems pretty odd as a way to pick players. But it has benefits as well. The expectations are clear. People who can't do it won't try. People who are in the ballpark and pass will feel special.
If I ever do an on-site interview again, I’ve given thought to just bringing in a six pack of beer. If I get any bullshit questions, I break out the beer and say “how about we pretend that I did a good job on this question and talk shop about what you really need here, because that’s what I’d like to talk about.”
It is a valid metric. It screens for "overachieving" types who have the will power to power through unpleasant drudgery for a pot of gold in the end. If they really want those kinds of people who am i say its 'silly'.
I think it is a case of this being the least worst option.
But, I also don't feel like it's some huge indignity? I have spent far longer on take home tests from companies than practicing leetcode most interview circuits. I wouldn't discount a company for asking these kinds of questions to try to get more signal from applicants.
I had the opposite experience leaving Facebook for a company that uses externally-available tools.
I do miss 2017 Scuba, Workplace, and Deltoid, since they worked well in Facebook's ecosystem. I do not miss the 2021 versions of those tools (and of most other internal tools in Facebook), which are bloated messes with less functionality and also somehow being slower and more resource-heavy.
One of my positive impressions when moving companies are how much better Grafana, Prometheus, JIRA, Slack, and many other external tools are from internal Facebook tools.
It makes sense if you see it from an influence perspective: external tools need to improve to get new users and retain current ones, but Facebook's tools need to constantly add new features to get PSC performance points and they always keeping a guaranteed audience of the entire company.
Phabricator is miles ahead of anything.
Automatic flaky test detection works like a charm and I miss it every day.
However, the organizational culture… I agree with a lot of what he noted about reorgs and that it feels like walking through molasses trying to get anything done quickly.
Most other tools are just unambiguously worse than their public counterparts though.
If the Chat team is ever able to get inline-threads out the door: https://chromeunboxed.com/google-chat-rooms-become-spaces, it should make rooms/spaces a much better experience.
There’s very basic usability and performance things that frustrate me on a fundamental level. The rest is at the margins.
Also, the builtin @silent way to chat a thread without notifying anyone is gold. Same goes for reminders. Also it’s chat + a consistent way to communicate out for a team. Workplace solves actual problems working with other people. Google Chat simply does slack-like chat, and poorly at that.
Edit: also all those things are drastically simpler than inline threads but not as sexy which tells you something about what the incentive structure looks like here. Disclaimer. I’m an ex googler. Thought chat was good when it came out but it’s regressed since then.
Newish dev doing my first attempt at a FAANG interview. Wondering if I should be trying for FaceBook as long as Im bothering to study. Had a very positive-feeling convo with a recruiter there ~6mo ago before "Meta". Sounds like it might be a negative thing to have on your resume now though?
Any thoughts?
I've been at Meta for 3+ years. I'm also interviewing. I have somewhere between 4 and 8 offers right now (not a humblebrag, just the facts). Not a single interviewer (from junior engineers to directors and VPs of engineering) asked me anything remotely like "Why are you still at an awful company like Facebook?"
The plural of anecdote is not "fact", but that's my experience: for engineers, it's still seen as a positive, or at worst, neutral.
But it’s certainly a factor when I’m reviewing resumes.
FAANG on your resume is an instant disqualification.
Honestly sounds like a bit of cope, especially if you've tried hiring in the past 10 years.
Largest? 400-1500.
Smallest? 30-70.
Compensation was highly variable.
FAANG employees are liabilities best avoided, everyone in leadership positions knows it.
Are you working in Europe as part of an old tech / non-tech company and the most you've ever made is $300k/yr or are you actually competing on the same level as big tech companies compensation wise where director+ who manages 300-500 makes $+1m/yr?
There are highly paid small places that are not FANG that still pay FANG or better, but they have really high standards. I want to know if your one of those, or one of those who as part of an ego protection cope say FANG is bad.
Now if you were a startup manager, yeah I can get why you might want to avoid FANG because you don't want people with big company habits in your small company that is trying to go fast, but usually those people say that out right, and they also tend to explicitly hire FANG types to scale their engineering org after a certain scale, because startup style stops working after your engineering org gets to a certain size.
I literally know a couple of unicorn founders in my personal life. They don’t think that. You’re full of shit and are probably a shit leader (if you’re not bluffing) if you make categorically false statements with such conviction (much like the former president).
It’s tens of thousands, tops. And let’s be honest, most of them are highly overrated.
> because they happened to work at some huge companies
Because they made the choice to work at some incredibly evil corporations. Give them some credit, they didn’t sleepwalk into their roles. They did it for that fat cash, and they sold their morals out to do so.
Jokes on them, I have the “fat cash” now and get to choose who I hire. Turns out I’m not a fan of the people who sold out.
FAANG are not incredibly evil corporations.
They are average evil, and incredibly successful.
If you are CTO at another company and you think your company is less evil, it's probably just less successful and you’re blinded to its evil by your vested interest in changing the “less successful” part.
> I haven't worked at FAANG
I doubt that.
> but I most definitely would not want to work for a company like yours.
You do you. But I make sure we pay way above average, I want the best people and the best people don’t work for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google.
But I’ve definitely made mistakes, and so far every hire I’ve honestly regretted worked for a megacorp prior to me hiring them.
Given the diversity of rewarding roles available to them, the best people aren’t pressured to accept morally compromising positions.
My point is I make sure my companies pay well. I want every employee to feel like they’re robbing me.
But I also want to make sure that I have as few employees as possible.
That said I appreciate your attitude here. These companies are civilizationally damaging. It’s good to keep repeating that. I’m just not sure your approach makes sense.
Not sure what makes Netflix evil, though. Clue?
“ I want the best people and the best people don’t work for Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google.”
Tell me when you hire a Yann LeCun or Jitendra Malik. Your claim is random shit-talk that’s not verifiable.
in which case it isn’t selling out. It is living life as an average person getting through life
I do my best, but I fully admit I am not perfect in this regard.
> allowing for atrocities like DuPont, never buy anything with Teflon in it,
I completely agree with you here. The leadership of these corps should have faced serious jail time for C8 contamination.
> We're all in the same exploitative evil system, get off your high horse and stop judging people for being employed.
I get it, but look at it from my perspective. I have a lot of money. I can hire people based on X or Y. I have the luxury of selecting skilled, amazing people who did not work for the system. Why would I see that as a bad thing?
Is it only FAANG, or are there others that you blacklisted? E.g. is MS on the list as well? How long is the list? Genuinely curious.
They might not ask you to your face to explain things like joining a company right after it got #metoo-ed, but if they care they’ll absolutely be thinking the question.
Then it’s entirely possible you work for an immoral mega corp and your judgment has been compromised by your paycheck.
Let me put it in a more blunt way you are more likely to understand. Your team is interviewing someone who was a process engineer on the deep water horizon oil spill. You’d probably feel gross hiring someone whose incompetence poisoned the Gulf of Mexico.
They did a fraction of the damage that FAANG engineers do to our society on a daily basis.
I'm seeing several of your posts here and it seems like you are making the inference "worked at FAANG" -> "horrible person", and while I have never worked at FAANG I have many friends I respect who have, and eventually left though it took some time.
It feels like you might be making an ad hominem attack here.
They are negative value add employees and I’ve yet to find a better way to filter them.
Working at Facebook as a software engineer is a choice; just like working at a bulge bracket investment bank is a choice.
The type of people that choose to work at either of these two are (more likely than not) people who do not have morals or a sense of character and values.
In my experience, being a good person only works when you're interacting with good people. If you're a good person interacting with a "bad" person, you tend to get a worse deal -- and if not alert, will unconsciously "sink" to their level, and start mirroring their behaviors in order to not get a bad deal.
Sooner or later, you're surrounded by "bad" people and have become a "bad" person yourself, simply by moral "osmosis," all because a few "bad" eggs spoiled the quiche.
I have been the type of person that naturally gravitated towards the "money money money" professions, because I did not have any strong role models to build a value system. Now that I'm out of that moral rut, I do not wish to go back. Just like an ex-addict who decides not to associate with other ex-addicts, because the chance of relapsing increases exponentially: I do not want people without any moral compass dragging me back down to their level.
I like the way things are. Things are good. Associating with Facebookers will make things bad. I don't want things to be bad.
I've tried very hard to express this viewpoint, without making value judgements, but it's moot: I have standards for what it means to be a good person, and Facebookers do not meet my standards -- so I won't associate with them. I won't hire them. And I will avoid collaborating with them.
Thank you, exactly this
Not actually true for early career SWEs, especially those that switched from a non-CS field. Because FAANG relies so much on coding puzzles, they are often the best option for someone that is self-taught without formal training. Since they often have a large recruiting pipeline, they are often the easiest places to get interviews without any connections, too.
I would also add that their ability to sponsor H1Bs is unmatched.
Everyone has good and bad in them, it's just the context you're interacting in and your own predispositions that brings out one or the other.
But no, I don't work for FAANG. I could say the same about any of my previous places of employment, none of which were even tech companies (unlike the current place).
But let's put all that aside - how does refusing to hire someone _leaving_ one of those companies improve the situation? Are you trying to establish an equilibrium where it becomes more costly in expectation to join one of those companies, because it might be harder to find another job afterwards? Good luck, I guess! I don't expect you'll move the needle much, especially given that there'll be quite a few people actively working against efforts like that.
It massively improves the situation. The kinds of people who work for these companies now are morally bankrupt. Everyone knows the score going in. They’re smart enough to pass l33t code but dumb enough to not make their own startups.
These are not the kinds of people you build groundbreaking companies with, they’re opportunistic parasites you’d do well to avoid.
I highly doubt, just based on sheer numbers and basic data, that the people working at your company are amazing humble people who care so much about the world. I doubt they are concerned with the homeless population and other disenfranchised groups. Vs in your case being all gung ho about the evils of FAANG that you are so above. The number of people who are against the current status quo enough and willing to sacrifice the comforts of their lives to fix the issue are so small. It’s not even a bad thing. That’s a hard thing to do. It’s much easier to point to a couple of big companies and say how evil they are and any one working for them.
Why is applying realistic negative values to behavior such as willful FAANG employment “judgmental”
You made the choice to work for a morally bankrupt megacorp because they paid you a crap ton of money. They paid your bills. You sold out, just own it and be a human instead of coping.
I didn’t say I have some kind of employee utopia, but we build real things that help real people and honestly do make the world a better more honest place.
> You made the choice to work for a morally bankrupt megacorp because they paid you a crap ton of money. They paid your bills. You sold out, just own it and be a human instead of coping.
Almost all of this can be tuned up a bit and be used against you. Unless you’re an incredible rarity that is doing amazing selfless work. I highly, highly doubt it.
It is much easier to point to easy “bad guys” and delude one self of one’s own work not being such great stuff either. Beyond that. This is a general moral stance. I’m sure if one was to compare you overall life, principles, morals, and a good hearted person working for a FAANG, your life wouldn’t be the one coming out ahead.
At least most humbler people can see “selling out” is not binary. You have sold out too. We all have.
—
Just realized. It appears you or whomever owns the business and companies. It is so incredibly easy to point to how self serving and it being the definition of selling out to gain more from the effort of others without doing equal amounts of work and effort. And no I’m not a socialist.
When I am considering whose resume is worth a call back for, there are a variety of signals:
- Is your resume even vaguely coherent
- Do you have things on your resume that suggest curiosity and the ability to get things done
- Are you likely to stick around long enough to be worth investing in you? So if you changed jobs every 1-2 years, you're going to lose a lot of points
- If you worked at a company which I don't think aligns with good treatment of the general public, how long did you work there? Was it early in your career, or late?
I explicitly codify that the hiring of former surveillance capitalism mercenaries is a fireable offense.
“But the equity was great” is not an excuse.
Anyone sub 40 was old enough to see the problems with Facebook and steer clear.
Working for them and “seeing the light” after years of collecting the blood money doesn’t give you any points with me.
The whole "won't say it to your face" is the absolute cherry on top. If you don't talk about it, how do you know they didn't join the company out of an overly optimistic sense of being able to change things from within, then quit when reality struck?
That excuse is maybe acceptable for someone who worked at Facebook 10 years ago, but someone who is still working there in the last couple of years? You might just be an employee but you’re willfully helping well-known behaviors.
This isn’t like some revelation of fraud that employees don’t know about. Countless articles have been written about the problems with Facebook and it has been in the crosshairs of national politicians several times.
At this point taking a job at Facebook is not really any different than accepting a marketing job at a cigarette company.
And I'm above the median for software devs in my area, but in a high CoL city in Canada.
Sure, we disqualified you when you listed them on your resume. You never got callbacks and probably blamed it on XYZ. You don’t understand, there’s a growing group of us in Silicon Valley that will never hire you if you have FAANG on your CV.
Similarly, I will not go to a company if people up the chain, including my immediate boss or the CEO are ex-FB.
If the CxOs are ex-FB I cannot expect it to be an ethical company.
But, that’s me.
They just don’t get it, we don’t want them. We believe they’re evil. We see them, and their skills, as a liability and not employable asset.
You seem to have an enormous chip on your shoulder towards FAANG companies. Did you work for one and fail spectacularly, or did you just get rejected a bunch of times?
How can the number of offers be indeterminate?
Also, who says I'm a "he"? FAANG companies have smart female engineers too (not nearly enough, but we're working on it)
Assuming you're saying this as a way to effectively double the pool of people your throwaway comes from, adding a bit to the entropy. Adding more writing style sample, and on another topic, probably does more to identify you than the extra bit of entropy reduced.
It’s very challenging, but you should definitely get in and try it yourself. Move to the Bay if you haven’t done so yet, it will keep your motivation up.
Almost certainly; if not, it's not because they didn't make enough to be one. Of course, "past performance is no guarantee of future returns."
Plus, Facebook-the-app is far more disliked than Meta-the-company especially now that's a formal distinction. I imagine it's still relatively cool to work on Instagram, for example.
My impression is the opposite, not just in my technical circles. Facebook is boring. Meta is (arguably) malicious.
Not with that attitude. I refuse to hire anyone with FAANG on their resume and you can all do it too.
Most of you on here are all woo woo Linux this and FSF that, but you won’t put your money where your mouth is.
I won’t hire you if you work for these assholes, and I’d love for more of you to join me.
To the rest of you: Sure, take that $300k total comp bro. Good luck working outside SV. Better be worth it.
I’ve found some incredible people that fulfill me, and that’s freed me.
I used to be afraid of what people would think if I said what I felt. Now I can say what I believe with little consequence and to be honest? Not going back.
Edit: Just realized you've left like 20 comments on this thread that are all grinding the same axe.
But I am honest.
The reason you sound salty is because you evaluate candidates based on whatever perception you have about who they are instead of trying to understand who they are.
I’m sure you don’t care, sounds like it’s working for you, so in any event congrats on finding what makes you happy!
No, I’m making very real concrete moral judgements about you based on who you chose to associate with.
Shall we look down on NASA engineers because it’s part of the US government and pulls heavily from the US military/has overlap with the intelligence services/some of its top secret projects maybe do things I’m morally opposed about?
This kind of guilt by association is pretty bad and that’s the pushback you’re seeing in this thread. Humans are social animals. No social group will be without it’s flaw and larger groups have more and larger problems. This same line of reasoning is what fuels religious and political persecution. It’s barely acceptable in sports but that’s because it’s mostly harmless and in good fun until you hit riot levels of idiocy. Heck, the big tech companies are massive. They have so many individual teams that do totally unrelated stuff to the things you might have issues with.
As for the bitterness someone else noted, it’s not that you stated your values. You went further and made the claim that these engineers would have trouble finding jobs outside of SV because of the association. That part is blatantly false on its face. They may have trouble because of niche skills that aren’t relevant elsewhere because the scale doesn’t exist elsewhere. Are there some employers who won’t hire us because of our association with some company? Sure. So? I’ll not choose companies for myriad of arbitrary reasons too. That doesn’t mean I’ll struggle to find a job overall.
As an aside, I find it a bit telling that you lump Netflix into it and then your primary complaint about the company was that they canceled a show you are attached to. That’s not even about morals and is fairly arbitrary. This is why there’s feedback that it looks like you’re salty about something unrelated and note you’ve attached a larger reason behind it based on morals.
For example, Netflix infamously pulled Hasan Minhaj’s episode on Saudi Arabia from Saudi Arabian Netflix in exchange for allowing Orange is the New Black to stay. They want to, for lack of better words, morally corrupt societies and they do not care if that means more injustice and political suppression.
Their leadership has stated one of their intentions was to promote things from western culture in other countries in order to change the culture and society there. This is blatantly cultural imperialism and an extension of US soft power projection.
The media has that addictive quality of captivating masses. I see Netflix as like a tobacco or Juul company — profoundly damaging for the groups of people they seek to captivate. And maybe a comparison to an oil company is apt; Netflix certainly pollutes in terms of the minds and behaviors of people. Time and focus and cognition spent watching their shows pushed by their algorithms entrenches their position in a world where they do not care for their negative externalities.
How do you live with yourself?
Doesn’t change what I do however. You can also just remove FAANG from your CV.
To me, your comment appears to be firmly in the latter.
If that truly is the case, hope you figure out what you are resentful about because, unbeknownst to you, it is alienating those who see such language.
I agree with your values but I would still think twice about working with you based on the comments in your history.
I’m firm, firm in my belief that the people who have chosen of their own free will to work for FAANG have made moral compromises that disqualify them from my employment.
I don’t get how this is “sanctimonious”.
These people have made some absolutely terrible life choices, and alienation is a part of the consequence package that comes with those life choices.
Side personal note: Fuck you guys for getting rid of stargate.
Although maybe it’s evidence in my favor? They have to pay people that much to keep doing what they know is wrong…
There’s lots of reasons people get paid large sums.
But, all FAANG, really? What business are you in that's so noble by comparison?
Some big companies are also big FOSS contributors. Some people even join these companies to do mostly FOSS (like Golang, AOSP, React, VSC). So if there's a contradiction there, I don't think it's that obvious for everyone.
> I won’t hire you if you work for these assholes
Actually this might be a good strategy if you have too many applicants and you pay closer to the median of the market rather than the top 10%, since such applicants are less likely to accept your offer. So better stop the process early.
If everyone who works at Facebook is blacklisted by people like you, it would just make the company a worse influence on the world because there would be noone left there to make it better. So I would prefer if good people had the freedom to try to make an impact according to their will without fear that people such as yourself will then work hard to tarnish their reputations. Thanks!
Meta is better than Alphabet about that, though.
Experience:
- You spent those two years becoming very skillful at some language where you can express invariants/constraints neatly, and know how to structure programs in something like Java, or modern C++ (OCaml, Scala, Rust, whatever, is fine)
- You are the kind of person who spent those two years with very little time road-blocked, i.e. every time you got stuck you found a way out.
- You have a conceptual understanding of low-latency
Lots of people do find the comp attractive, so I find that leading with it hits poor outcomes, so sadly I won't post a job link, but you can either email me and I promise to respond or you can stick something in your profile and I will look tomorrow.
I'm probably not the right fit for the job, I'm happily a lowly kernel developer with 20 years experience on half the salary and not in SV/SF. But I do appreciate the answer and maybe your post leads to a mutually beneficial arrangement with someone here.
Didn't work out for other reasons but I was embarrassed.
Although as another aside, I know some kernel devs who do very low level work for HFT. You're not in Chicago or NYC so maybe you're not in that game. Or at least you're happy to keep a healthy distance from the coalface.
In which way does it transpire during interviews / once they join your company?
Among all your potential future interviewers, the percentage of those who would judge you negatively for a Facebook work experience is vanishingly small - be mindful of the HN echo chamber. Besides, you probably don't want to work in those places anyway. (Not that it's necessarily bad to hate Facebook, but if your manager can't separate their political belief from reviewing candidates, would you want to work there?)
I’ve always made sure to hit top-tier pay and a FAANG entry on your CV is an instant disqualification.
Being mediocre is easy.
I’d rather have 2-3 expert engineers making 2x pay than 10 mediocre engineers making 1x pay.
There is a sweet spot where you can scale with one expert in each domain, and if that “expert” is well compensated they can replace an entire engineering dept.
I know 2x is still ridiculously high, even 1x is a very reasonable amount to live on, but 2x doesn't compare to 5x.
The problem is that, you sound like are expecting me to respect you.
You sold out, sure you got some more cash for your trouble so congrats I guess. I just want you to be honest about what you did.
It's not like that in most of the world.
In many places even senior software engineers have to choose between:
- nasty companies (advertisement, finance and trading, faangs, real estate speculation, cryptocurrencies, gambling and worse) that provide a living salary and provide a decent working environment
- few ok-ish companies that can offer a low salary, very unremarkable conditions and stability
- start your company or consultancy and make 0 money
- regret working in software and open a grocery store
- be unemployed
Let’s say your skill is worth $125k avg.
I’m not exactly interested in the people who can be that, and there’s a lot of them. I want the people who can make me feel like $250k is a steal etc.
My thoughts? Screw ‘em. They aren’t worth your skill set. I’m not joking, fuck these people. The paycheck they give you won’t make you happy, what will however is not working for these scumbags.
I don't personally like the company or Zuck or some of the things it does very much, but they aren't the devil. I could say the same about probably most corporations. Where do you work that's pure as the driven snow?
It's not about 100% purity. Just not doing this one little, tiny, fundamental-to-their-entire-business thing.
It's never that simple.
What corporations are okay to work for, in this unidimensional worldview? Exxon Mobil? Philip Morris? Pfizer? Dupont? Boeing? Nestle? BHP? Fox News? Volkswagen? Nike? HSBC? Is it okay if your employer's owners or executives have appeared in the panama papers? Are or have been on the boards of FAANG companies or own stock in those companies? Are you allowed to buy Google or Apple products and use their services?
What about companies that collect and trade on the personal information and habits they collect about their customers, just not on the scale of Facebook or Google? Are they okay? Even if they would like to be able to sell more personal information but don't presently have the means to would that be okay?
So where do you work? What products and services do you buy?
Note this wasn't the poster I initially asked the question of. It was someone else just coming in and trying to tell me "it's that simple". My reply was not whataboutism, it was explaining why it's not "that simple".
And it wasn't a rhetorical question, I really want to know, from someone who does have this very simple "line", whether it's okay to use Apple or Google or Facebook services or products, whether it's okay to work for companies whose owners or executives own stock? Whether it's okay to vote for politicians who take money from them or who themselves own the stock?
This isn't whataboutism, it is exploring the consequences of this moral position.
I'd personally love to know what everyone actually works on. In real life I know people who work on guided missiles and ICBM-adjacent tech who manage to sleep well at night.
And FB-the-social-network is also great in theory: groups help you make friends and go deep into very niche interests. Without it, I would be a more normal, less interesting person. Now, with the join of a group, you can immerse yourself in a hobby even if absolutely nobody in a hundred miles shares that interest. It helps people go deeper on what they care about, thus becoming 'weirder' or a more fulfilled version of themselves. And helps people get ads they care about.
Let me give you another point of view:
Ads benefit the already wealthy corporations above small businesses that cannot pay billions for ads and add another lay on to inequality.
"Reinventing the wheel" is sometimes necessary for innovation, often called disrupting the market.
Also, I believe that endless consumerism is actually killing the planet and ads (no only banner ads but also product placements) play a huge part in making people feel insecure and less worthy just because they don't have the newest gadget.
I kinda agree on the consumerism thing, but that's more a reflection of our society than evil genius advertisers.
Putin would love to be as evil as the US or even China, but hasn't got the scratch. Russia has its billionaire oligarchs, but the US has probably a hundred times as many. China murders more innocents every day than Putin does rabble rousers in a year.
Zuck isn't Putin. He isn't Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs. He isn't even Bolsanaro, or Duterte. He would like to be.
What about Rupert Murdoch and Fox News? Anti-vaxxers are why we are still in this mess. Yet I constantly see Covid misinformation on Facebook. We could discuss the genocide in Myanmar, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook's psyops campaign against their users, etc.
Maybe Zuck isn't the devil. But he sure as hell is irresponsible at being the CEO of Facebook. If you can't tame the scale of your operation then you shouldn't be that size to begin with. The collateral damage is too significant.
> pure as the driven snow
There are degrees. There are literally thousands of places that are not Fox News, Exxon, Nestle, or Facebook. Especially in the tech world. You can't toss your resume out on the street in Silicon Valley without it landing in the lap of a recruiter. I'd start with "didn't contribute to genocide" or "didn't think a psyops campaign on our users was okay" is a good place to start. I've certainly never worked at such a place.
I don't think he's the devil either. I do know the nature of their game though. It's to divide people. They're doing a great job of it.
> Anti-vaxxers are why we are still in this mess. Yet I constantly see Covid misinformation on Facebook. We could discuss the genocide in Myanmar, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook's psyops campaign against their users, etc.
Some people get extremely sanctimonious about the latest thing their politics or corporate "news" media or the current popular trend on twitter gets them riled up about. Of course they will never face up to the fact that the companies they work for and buy from are neck deep in politics, consumerism, advertising, influencing, the war industry, corruption, greed, etc., too.
These people aren't nearly so brave or numerous in the real world as they would have you believe though. If you personally feel okay working for a company then I wouldn't bother worrying about the opinion of hypocrites.
I do know one or two people who think and care very deeply about this stuff and they (to some degree) put their money where their mouth is by attempting to avoid and not support these things they disagree with. They are typically the last to point their finger at others.
Rather than focusing on how an association with FB would be viewed on your resume -- you may want to ask yourself whether that company lives up to your own moral standards, and whether (just to yourself) you would feel proud of yourself for working there.
Many people have come to the conclusion that it is an extremely cynical and unethical company:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Criticisms_and_contro...
And that even aside from the specific episodes of abusive behavior, that its core product is basically toxic:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036519/facebook...
Meanwhile, some of the founder's behavior in his early adult years can best be described as nakedly sociopathic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg#Early_years
Whether any of this matters to you is ... up to you. But it is definitely a question you may want to investigate before you start working there -- rather than after you've signed the dotted line.
Being as asking your recruiter or your interviewers these questions -- isn't likely to get you very far.
I can't see that affecting someone's employment.
Your points are why someone shouldn't vote for Mark for president not why someone shouldn't take a job.
... acted like a sociopathic in some people's opinion?
What's with the attempt at dissimulation here? The issue is what the guy did. Not "some people's opinion" of what he did.
I can't see that affecting someone's employment.
I can't see how the founder's ethical standards (expressed not just through what they did 16 year ago, but in the present day) wouldn't affect your experience working at their company.
The fish rots from the head, as the saying goes.
Why stop at facebook. Throwing chairs should make Microsoft a dead zone. Steve behaviour at Apple in the 80s should force you to return your iphone. Oracle, Amazon are not angels either.. Many of those small places are much worse..
So we're going in circles now.
Any and all issues raised about a company's ethical behavior in the current day (for example, outsourcing to suppliers with deplorable labor practices) are equivalent to stories of a founder's poor interpersonal skills from decades ago, in your view.
Some background:
I'm quite pro-privacy. I go to great extents to marginalize cloud services in my life. I pay for services and am, by default, skeptical of free services. I consider this core to my ethos as a person. I was raised in a decently religious household, but went to a religious school, every day, for over a decade - I'm not a fan of "morals".
I'm also a senior engineer who does most of our hiring filtering for a fairly large firm. I will interview and hire Facebookers, Googlers, Amazonians etc. They're skilled, usually in singular domains, and passionate people - thus useful. Do I agree with their ethical compasses or excuses they've made for such work as a person? Absolutely not. However, their life is not my life, and I'm sure there's judgements they could equally pass on to me about my life and experiences if I were so brazen to (publicly) pass my judgement on to them.
There's some inevitable questions that come with my view:
How do you trust them given the orientation of their ethical compass? Simple. My company (and team!) has our own ethical frameworks and principles. If they don't abide by them my judgement isn't needed - the company will terminate them.
How do you listen to talk about ethics or morals from them? I don't. The great thing about ethical frameworks is they're usually set by people far above me who have a much higher view of the landscape than I do. Morals are a cathartic replacement for ethical frameworks when someone needs to feel good about themselves; thus they're pretty irrelevant when ethical frameworks are abound.
It's not what you want to do with your life, but I've had jobs at suspect places while I was getting established (Palantir) and lots and lots of others have too. It's better than having worked somewhere people haven't heard of (ie above replacement value) and much better than having worked somewhere with a reputation for doing poor technical work.
I’m not disagreeing with his choice, it’s a personal one and he may not want early retirement, but I would find it extremely difficult.
As someone mid career and planning on early retirement, I look at this situation as a choice between working X more years at Facebook being mildly fulfilled or 2*X years elsewhere for only a chance at being happier.
Again that’s my personal view based on my own retirement goals and savings rate. I’m sure he made the right choice for himself.
Sustainability is a real thing. You don't have to wait until "FIRE status" or whatever the cool kids want to sell you podcasts about in order to have a life.
But, I’ve watched colleagues who get and stay miserable because they just need another 15/10/5/3 years. Misery is tough and I’ve seen people really destroy themselves chasing the end goal.
Point is, find your happiness first.
I’d have to really hate my job to give that up, especially since he noted it’s easy to rest and vest with a few hours of work per day.
Able to work from home might have significantly sweetened the deal.
It's not possible to fully experience a foreign country/culture in a 1 week vacation.
No idea about surfing, but it's not possible to even get a sense of what skiing has to offer in a couple of weekends a year.
Maybe, for a few people, it's possible to find the motivation and energy to fully immerse yourself in working on your own software after already having put in a full day of work, but they are in a tiny minority.
This is the only life we’ve got. Don’t spend it bored.
The openness to remote work has been huge. I have colleagues in the bay and NYC. We get paid the same but my money goes twice as far.
At the same time, I've always been a frugal person. When at FB, I budgeted like I was making about 1/5 of my actual income since I always saw it as a transitory windfall.
I don't think I've done anything outside the standard box of lowering my expenses and investing anything I've saved.
for me personally it mean getting the opportunity to not be shackled by money.
you can spend the rest of your life working on whatever project/idea you want without it ever needing to be perverted by money in order to sustain yourself.
a lot of problems/services solved by many business would be more effective for both sides if the business didn't have as a goal first generating profit and then solve stated problem second (or further down the list of priorities)
I won’t stop working, but I might work the kind of jobs that would otherwise require sharing a rental or living in sprawl.
In 3-4 more years at big corporates I think I could get my 1BR condo paid off with some passive income to offset property taxes. The HOA fee is basically a “normal” rent and I could pay that out of any job. I’m not sure what’ll happen if I ever need a 2BR though.
And I've found it gets worse once you realize you are financial independent or within spitting distance of the early-retirement. It magnifies the BS and makes it easier to mouth off. It also magnifies the concerns around inflation and stock market returns that could chain you to the 9-5 longer than planned.
Most millennials or younger won't be retiring until they're 70+ if ever on average the way the world is going. I certainly hope I'm as lucky as you and glad to hear you're enjoying it and keeping your mind engaged.
EDIT: forgot the employer match. More like $600k.
(This is not financial or tax advice; listen to me and I will definitely lose all your money and send you to club fed.)
For those of us not in that situation it's a lot harder, especially if you want to work now so you don't have to work later and can retire asap.
I once felt that way but after leaving FAANG years later, I realized how snobby something like this would sound.
We did have partners with all sorts of companies for discounts, so I would be surprised that there were discounts available, but it wasn’t like when you give your employee information when getting a loan they would do anything different. Now the travel perks were just being at FAANG we quite-nice and I miss those.
Is it normal for a software engineer (or anybody who could afford it after saving for a few months) to get a loan to buy a car in the US? Is it worth it financially? Or is it to improve credit scores, maybe?
No! This does not mean you must interview Jr engineers and Sr engineers identically!
You can drop the leet coding requirements for experienced candidates and have no legal worries as long as all similarly experienced candidates are interviewed and judged similarly. It's actually extremely common for companies to have different interviews for different experience levels.
They single-handedly fucked hiring for the entire industry.
Many of my peers have found success and homes with outstanding companies with wonderful culture that have abandoned this archaic interviewing process. cling to it if you must, but it is broken beyond repair and people are starting to trend away from it.
> They single-handedly fucked hiring for the entire industry.
I'm not sure about single-handedly. I think you can blame the creators of LeetCode as well :-)
Apologies if this comes off short, I'm actively involved in hiring now, and have been at a lot of tech companies. I do my best to help keep the process at minimum consistent. Bringing in the right people is never easy, but is incredibly critical to the success of your business.
Happy to answer questions, though.
Interviews aren't fun, but there's not something "wrong with the industry" if the questions are relevant to the work. He even complimented their choice of programming questions.
I've been with my currently employer 19 years, but if I found myself in an interview I'd expect them to ask me technical questions. If they didn't ask them, it would be a red flag. What if they asked me an "offensively" basic question? Great, I can make quick work of it, no insult taken.
It has happened to me only once that I interviewed someone far more senior (and was a PhD) who got offended when asked about some simple technical issues. He deflected my questions, and so was flushed immediately.
Check this out: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/yahoo-investor-ceo-lied-about-t...
Everywhere I've worked (mostly large companies) the seniors write much more code than the juniors.
To be fair, most senior engineers should be involved in code reviews regularly, so it’s very unlikely they are incompetent coders.
Companies' enthusiasm for hiring developers worries me not even a little. Of much greater moment, IStM, is the character, or lack of, demonstrated by company officers. That CEO's final e-mail lays him all out. I will certainly not be applying to work at Replit.
"Then there’s the Prestige. Facebook gets a lot of blame in media lately, but in everyday life it’s still very prestigious place to be working at. Getting a mortgage or a car loan is easy, saying you work for Facebook gets you on the fast line."
That's the money quote, this person is only thinking about themself and really doesn't consider how their work impacts society or what company they're helping as a priority issue at all. I don't know why people like this are the way they are, it seems to border on sociopathy or greed or something to me ("screw you guys, I got mine.") At times they must have just buried their head in the sand over all the Facebook scandals including helping a freaking genocide. It's crazy, and reminds me a little of "American Psycho" to be honest.
I don't think he is morally at any fault.
Here's another way of looking at it: Fb is so damn big, there's no reason them looking bad to the public should condemn every software developer on their payroll.
So no ethical responsibility? I strongly disagree. They could've quit at any time and found dozens of jobs elsewhere with a resume like that. Judging by the post they did after nearly a decade, and only because purely selfish reasons. I was maybe a bit harsh, but come on..
That's very normal, and I don't want to condemn the author for this, but this is a trap. If you get used to the consumption that a 5% salary offers you, then you will have an extremely hard time finding a job that's not at the 5% or better compensation. And those other jobs might come with other tradeoffs that make them unpalatable in other ways.
Avoiding the hedonic treadmill[0] is a good habit to get into if your compensation goes up. It increases your financial stability, and means that you can take a lower paying job if you decide that it'll make you happier in other ways.
0 - Technical term for how increased spending sets your expectations higher, and quickly stop bringing the rush that they first brought.
I'm interested to know why you didn't use your network more when looking for new opportunities. Amjad of Replit is an ex Facebook employee, after all.
The scope of work narrowed a lot. There was a shift to focus on review cycles instead did shipping cool stuff and avoiding being crushed by competitors like Google. Towards the end I fell into the trap of fixating on perf reviews and came close to burning myself out after switching roles.
Even in the era that I enjoyed, I met people who had a bad experience. Either due to projects that didn't pan out, bad managers, or just not being a good fit for the culture.
Absolutely.
I would say successful employees find an intersection between their interests+skills and what is needed. That might seem generic but it’s important to realize and spend time focusing on.
I see prep for interviews as table stakes, and accept it as such. but I still regret that my slow thinking strength can shine in these contexts.
As much as we like to talk about algorithms, it's pretty rare that anything more interesting than DP comes up at work unless you are doing optimization research or work in a niche domain like bioinformatics.
Interviewing someone with an LC hard is a colossal waste of time unless the position you are filling is like "senior staff swe: performance and optimization"
I’ve been there and refused offers because of that. How do you get past this feeling of a company screwing you over unless their offer is higher than your current comp?
(1) You allude to it with "even continued employment" but it deserves to be explicit: "up or out" makes everything about PSC twice as bad as it already is. I wasn't subject to it myself (I was hired at a "terminal" level) but I saw it cause much grief for more junior folks.
(2) Mandatory oncall can be "meh" on some teams but absolute hell on others. On my first team (small service) I was in a rotation that had as few as two members at one point. Oncall every other week. On my second team (large service) I was on three rotations for a while. In both cases things could get very intense. Not only no work/life balance either way, but also no time for "impact" on your PSC when you spend the whole time fighting fires, plus cleanup the next week, plus working on follow-up tasks after each SEV review.
The combination of these two factors led to many people deferring everything they could from their own shift into the next, plus never working on cleanup or follow-up tasks, because that's the behavior PSC rewards. The intent behind PSC was good - to be quantitative and fair - but in effect I agree that it drove much of FB's internal dysfunction.
Really curious how it works now with the cycle moving to annual cadence. I really doubt though that two years of Meets Most is going to be acceptable.
I'm planning to interview for a large company the coming weeks, and I'm truly disappointed that I struggle even on the Easy level. I guess I never needed to solve such issues in my previous jobs (backend, SRE).
As an interviewer I try to be in the hypothetical 10%, but I'm pretty sure I'm not.
I spend some but far from most of my time writing code, I write RFCs, documentation, code reviews and emails, but don’t really know how this compares to positions at other companies. At some places a staff engineer seems to simply be a senior engineer who’s been around for a while.
For almost 2 years, I had almost nothing to do, no software to write, no green fields to explore, no products to develop. I'm in a large unit and there's unit level funding with silly goals that the whole unit (hundreds of people) has to achieve. I have consulted here and there for specific projects, but for the most part I am left alone.
Which means I have a lot of free time in my days and my vacations, official and unofficial, have been of the "gap year" or late 19th century bon viveur type: visits to major Asian capitals, beach life in Turkey, adventures all over the world.
My ratings have been more than good, but I often wonder if I should stop this grand experiment in paid time off and take a new step in my career. But where? There are few companies that pay as much and it's pretty (or very!) stressful living. Then, I'd have to go on the interview circuit, studying for a couple of months to prepare (wtf!) being judged by half-asleep people who couldn't care less if I get into the company or not. And why? I enjoy my free time and have lots of activities, hobbies and interests that I love. Certainly the current state of affairs could end, but the same could be said of any "experience".
Contrary to what many others in the tech industry apparently think, if I didn't get paid, I would never work one second for someone else. It's all a transaction and I'm not particularly passionate about my job. I don't hate it, but if it were to disappear as a profession tomorrow, I wouldn't cry.
1. Having purposeful, moderated meetings with minutes and deliverables that can be evaluated. When you force people to deliver something, and when that something will be subject to open evaluation, meetings stop being "free" and people that see "meetings as a job" will quickly give their 2 weeks notice and go away to the next company that will sponsor their lazy lifestyle.
Managers are employees too, and their performance is more important than the performance of the people they manage.
2. Communication with the team is solved by verifying communication. At the end of a meeting, ask a random person in the room if they understood the presentation. At the end of a standup meeting, ask a random team member what someone else was doing. You will be surprised with the results. And people will grow around this process by becoming better communicators, and by owning their responsibility as attendees.
3. For code reviews, you should start by automating as much as you can with static analysis, creating a coding standard and documenting good practices, then adding a human at the end to verify that humans are not cheating by suppresing rules. Also, make sure that the feedback is about the code, is fair and never gets personal.
The main takeaway is: verify everything. Take nothing for granted.
Huh.
And you can get that prestige and success working a couple of hours a day.
Huh.
What a weird world.
Americans be like: “man, this 400k USD job is so boring, I need better work-life balance”
Meanwhile Europeans have to make do with 60k EUR jobs with zero work-life balance but hey, at least we have free healthcare, right?
Free healthcare that costs us half our salary. Cool.
That's interesting. I wonder which companies these are?
Nope, article is 100% about author's own well-being and happiness.
Yeah, why is that?
Same for most Realtors.
Most people aren’t that great at what they do. They do enough to get by and don’t make a ton of mistakes, but they rightfully don’t give 100%.
Source: Me. Am not great at what I do. Don’t give 100%. Do make a number of mistakes. Do enough to get by but not much more.
You can only nudge conversions to each successive "step" so much. Once you've reached diminishing returns, the only thing left to do is get more leads into the funnel -- grind the process out/pick up the phone and dial.
Feast or famine jobs also don't lend themselves well to "long-term thinking." If something is working, don't break it, just keep on going and make that paper. If something isn't working, you don't have the time/soundness of mind to figure it out, just keep on going (or else you won't be able to pay your bills).
Jobs are a commodity and the only selling point is price/pay -- making it one of the worst things to "sell" (the "best"/easiest things to sell are the antithesis of this).
I think the main draws at a startup for a post-FAANG senior engineer are feeling good about the product they build (more useful to the world than FB's ads) or the role/environment (less bureaucracy and org process). I am sure there are many exceptions, but I suspect that after 10 years in a senior role at a FAANG money stops being the most important thing you need from a job. My 2c.
Just as a comparative data point from the other side of the pond (we're mainland 'yurp): our eldest is currently fighting off some kind of infection with swollen glands and abdominal pain and within the last 10 days I have visited:
- our regular doctor twice - [the first time] was referred for ultrasound at another doctor, where he was seen immediately [then] - referral to a paediatrician, where he was seen the next day [and] - he eventually ended up having a complete check-up in the paediatrics department of our nearest hospital, including blood tests.
None of that was much fun at all, as any parent will know, thankfully so far none of it uncovered anything bad (thank $deity), but happily all of it was funded from general taxation and deductions that everyone here contributes to.
Which is a relief.
Next time I'm tempted to whinge about how high the tax rates are here, I need to remember not to.
As in, the same very same tests your company now expects new candidates to "solve" (pretending they haven't seen it before) in about 30 minutes tops. In order to, you know, keep out the riff-raff.
I've solved almost all of the easy and mediums, though.
My perspective of "hard" LC problems is that they are typically distributed over a system anyways, where the optimal parts make the whole. That, or they are domain-specific analogs, like complex solvers, or involve graduate graph theory, etc.
What is your perception? I haven't done LC in about a year and a half.
https://www.teamblind.com/post/I-always-ask-leetcode-hard-7S...
Smells like a troll - but perhaps only "partially" so.
There was maybe one question that I'd say was objectively hard (because it was completely unexpected and blew my mind - fortunately I did it OK) - but I don't think practicing LeetCode hard level would've helped there anyway. And then several questions were barely above LeetCode easy level and I had a brain fart. (Should have practiced binary trees a bit more, dammit.)
IMHO LeetCode hard level is a waste of time, unless you know for sure that the company you're preparing for gives these questions.