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Comment by portlander52232 | Hacker News Reader

If you haven’t tried FAANG, it might be worth considering. I took a FAANG job on a lark, intending to stay a short time just to have it on my resume, and ended up liking the job way more than I expected and stuck around much longer than planned. In particular, my expectations about the job were completely inaccurate. The office politics, corporate bureaucracy, interpersonal dynamics, and overall stress level are all way better than I ever experienced at small companies. You cite a lack of small teams as your reason for avoiding FAANG (and I know there are probably others), but I’m generally working with 1–4 people at a time.

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In my interpretation of this question, and what attracted me to read the thread, was an indication of wanting to avoid trying to compete for FAANG positions and not being in a position where they couls simply "accept a job at FAANG on a lark". While I'd certainly consider my preferences if I was offered a job at Amazon, I'm not being offered jobs at Amazon, I'm being offered abstract timed algorithm screening questions.

To somebody considering a position in FAANG - ask yourself: is it a good company to work in? Does this company help the society, does it make lives of people better? Or is this company focusing on bringing monetary benefits using existing monopolistic position? Can such a company be created again today, or is it just employing previously favorable conditions, which are long since skewed to avoid creating meaningful competition? Does this company shares the wins obtained from massive data gathering and analysis - or does it use them to cement its unique position in IT, while refusing to give back to societies which still figuring out how to work in these new markets? If you're going to work in these companies - will you be proud or will people point to you and saying that you're the causes of their griefs or that you participated in robbing people of values and valuables?

I'll bite.

Assuming these companies are morally evil, why not join to change them in a virtuous direction?

Either you can make positive change or if you can't make change, then you're not necessarily additive to evil ("do no harm").

Unless you are joining as a SVP at least, this idea makes no sense.

Do you realize you're making my point?

It's really hard to make an impact (good/bad) at large firms.

Not true, its very easy to make a bad impact. Your work will almost always generate profit and capital for the company. On the other hand, making a good impact is much harder.

> Your work will almost always generate profit and capital for the company.

Let alone my experience, I have NEVER seen an argument supporting this conclusion. If anything, it's the opposite.

The capitalist mode of production relies on extracting the surplus value of the worker. Simply put, people have jobs because the company makes more money with the worker than without the worker. I have never heard any economist, heterodox or not, claim otherwise.

You're really misusing words based on common meaning.

And your phrasing can't reconcile why "90% of startups fail".

You're making a values judgment that's talking past this thread.

If you were being sarcastic, then I did not realize, no.

I don't see how me being sarcastic, you'd reach the same conclusion.

There's clearly a miscommunication.

> Assuming these companies are morally evil

OK, but what if we /don’t/ assume that? I understand that’s the only acceptable sentiment on HN, but it’s disappointingly uninformed.

Yes all the while taking advantage of their services and probably working for VC backed companies hoping that one of the “evil capitalistic companies” will acquire them.

Strangely enough I don’t see anyone railing against for profit evil companies willing to sacrifice their pay to work for a non profit or go into social work.

Indeed, and a complete lack of understanding of real value. For every HNer that complains about FAANG, there’s a million humans that enjoy and use their products.

Ironically, for eg, most of the DuckDuckGo posts here end up with DDGers explaining how they enjoy using “!g”…

Just because people use a product doesn't mean its intrinsically good

But if said people want to clutch their pearls about the “evil monopolistic capitalist”, they should be willing to make the sacrifices and not use those services, work for companies that use those services or work for VC funded companies who are hoping to be bought out by those companies.

How many people who want to take the moral high ground will give up their CS pay to become social workers to “make the world a better place.”?

Just because you don’t think a product isn’t intrinsically good, doesn’t make it so either?

Only the most dogmatic critics of FAANG would argue that FAANG products provide no value. Everyone else is willing to acknowledge that they’re useful but come with trade offs - like everything else in life.

Name one for profit company that has any other goal besides profit?

Do you apply your moralistic stance to the second order derivative? Will you refuse to work for a company that is hosted on one of those companies? That advertises on one of those companies? Will you try to get your company to block Google from searching?

Do you think YCombinator funds companies for any other reason than for profits?

A companies goal is to make a profit. If you are concerned about the greater good, encourage your government to tax the corporations and implement programs to help people.

> Name one for profit company that has any other goal besides profit?

From the top of my head - Costco has a reputation of being a better place to work in. I may be mistaken, bring your points if you want. Costco doesn't nearly have the position on its market comparable to, say, Google's, so it's a good example of the company which has to - and does - care more about society it's in.

> Do you apply your moralistic stance to the second order derivative?

No I don't. I do breathe the same air as currently alive criminals, for example.

> Will you try to get your company to block Google from searching?

If I get to define technical policies in a company, e.g. make a startup I'll try. I'm optimistic that it's doable.

> Do you think YCombinator funds companies for any other reason than for profits?

I think there are reasons that YCombinator funds companies for other reasons too, yes.

> A companies goal is to make a profit. If you are concerned about the greater good, encourage your government to tax the corporations and implement programs to help people.

I believe it's a simplistic approach. Following the "letter" of the idea "bring benefits to shareholders" usually assumes "short-term benefits". Here's the contradiction.

Few industries have had more deleterious impact on American society than big box retail. Tobacco, maybe.

I would much rather take responsibility for Facebook than for the hellscape of parking lots and chain stores that dominate the environment around any home worth less than a million dollars.

How do you suggest lower and middle income people purchase their necessities? You can’t feed 330 million people through farm-to-table distribution. That’s not to say they can’t be improved on.

How do you suggest that lower and middle class people find stuff on the internet (Google) or can afford phones (Android)? How do you suggest small companies take advantage of a global distribution network and unknown authors get their books published (Amazon)? Who has done more to commoditize computers to make them affordable than Microsoft and Google? Amazon raising wages to $18/hour lifted wages for everyone. Yes the “evil monopolies” have done good also.

I purposefully left out Facebook. I don’t see how they have been a net good for society. I also left our Apple, since they don’t focus on the “lower and middle income”.

What I wonder is why do poor wage slavers like you enjoy tounging the boot so much?

Well, three responses:

1. I have an addiction to food and shelter and my parents seem to have a problem taking care of someone who is almost 50.

2. According to DQYDJ, I’m in the 97th percentile of income earners [1]. I am not bragging, a college grad 5 years out of school would be too as an SDE2 at any major tech company.

3. Are you independently wealthy or do you also exchange labor for money?

[1] https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

Walkable communities. Main Street. Local independent stores.

> Costco has a reputation of being a better place to work in

This shifts the goalposts towards “good place to work in”, which I would say large companies like FAANG easily qualify for.

However, this is exactly the problem. The press and social media love dunking on tech companies, so we collectively forgot about all the other industries.

If we go back to the initial concern of morality, are you claiming Costco doesn’t care about profit, has a fully ethical supply chain, pays all levels of workers fairly, treat customers fairly, etc?

This is rhetorical btw, since literally no company in our globalised capitalist world can fulfil these goals. They can only virtue-signal while committing atrocities…

>> Costco has a reputation of being a better place to work in

> This shifts the goalposts towards “good place to work in”, which I would say large companies like FAANG easily qualify for.

This takes my words out of context.

I second that.

I've worked for many companies whose goal was not to make a profit, but instead to make the world better for one group of people.

They did profit, but that was really just so they could afford to continue to help their target audience.

I've never really understood the anger toward share holders. Most people have a pension, and that's invested in the stock market. When people say "share holders" I think of teachers pensions, and nurses pensions, my welders-widow grand mother. The "share holders" are people.

RE tax.. I can't think of a better way to light money on fire. Australia recently spent nearly 100million on a Covid safe app that tracked people. It was an utter flop, and I'm not sure it tacked down even one person. 100 Million $ on a 100% predictable flop.

Did your company have VC backers? I guarantee you that they were concerned about profits over everything else.

What specifically did the companies you held in such high regards do that caused them to forego profit?

Have you thought that company’s “treat their employees better” because retention has bottom line benefits?

None of the major tech companies got there by worrying only short term benefits.

Did you chose computer science over something like social work for the monetary benefits?

Sen. Ralph Owen Brewster: All right this has gone on long enough. Juan Tripp is a great American. His airline has advanced the cause of commercial aviation in this country for decades. Juan Tripp is a patriot. Juan Tripp is not a man who's interested in making money.

Howard Hughes: Well, I'm sure his stockholders would be happy to hear that.

[Everybody starts laughing]

You should absolutely try to work for a monopoly if at all possible. Monopolies have the luxury of indulging smart people with big-budget pie-in-the-sky R&D projects and little to no short-term profitability or productivity discipline, which are just about the best possible working conditions for engineers. Also where you are most likely to make real progress on a serious problem that contributes to society, instead of being micromanaged hour by hour to make sure you stay on task in grinding out a sales-driven feature backlog for some enterprise bloatware no one needed.

> You should absolutely try to work for a monopoly if at all possible.

I did, and I agree that there are possibilities. They aren't nearly always available - R&D departments in Microsoft or Google are very different than their cash cow departments. I wonder if the former justify the latter. It's not enough, say, to be a PhD to get into those departments, so only minority of engineers can indulge themselves working there.

I don't know why you'd only apply this rubric to FAANGs. Every company is horrible; it's fundamental to private ownership of capital, and therefore you should not work, especially not in IT

Sure. But do you think that, say, Tesla is as horrible as Facebook? i.e. electric cars are as horrible as advertisement?

I don’t see much value in comparing random companies across verticals, but I’ll bite.

Tesla is a luxury electric car company that is dependant on a very immoral supply chain to procure various raw materials, for their cars and batteries, i.e. pretty much everything. Of course, nobody cares about the hidden blood/slavery inherent to their supply chain.

Facebook is a social media company, that billions of people use and enjoy, while being monetised by ads (attention). It has been used as a “weapon” to create radical parties and subvert democratic process - but at a larger global scale than traditional press media could achieve.

Not everything is cut and dry, and most mainstream opinions are manufactured by the global media. Why /did/ we all collectively forget about every other industry than tech? Because the media is being replaced by social networks, and they’re facing an existential crisis, so they respond with biased coverage. Think hard about that!

You really haven’t heard about how badly Tesla treats its workers?

https://thesuffolkpersonalinjurylawyer.com/injuries-unsafe-w...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/03/12/hundred...

Why is Tesla intrinsically better? Is it because Elon Musk hangs out with Joe Rogan?

Tesla is as toxic as any FAANG. Every Tesla employee I've talked to has been treated worse than I get treated at AWS.

I had a very similar experience. Surprised (and delighted) the hell out of me.

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